Marilynne Robinson’s mythical world of Gilead, Iowa --- the setting of her novels GILEAD, HOME and LILA --- and its beloved characters have illuminated and interrogated the complexities of American history, the power of our emotions and the wonders of a sacred world. JACK is the fourth novel in this now-classic series. In it, Robinson tells the story of John Ames Boughton, the prodigal son of Gilead’s Presbyterian minister, and his romance with Della Miles, a high school teacher who is also the child of a preacher. Their deeply felt, tormented, star-crossed interracial romance resonates with all the paradoxes of American life, then and now.

Marilynne Robinson has plumbed the human spirit in her renowned novels, including LILA, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and GILEAD, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In this new essay collection, she trains her incisive mind on our modern political climate and the mysteries of faith. Whether she is investigating how the work of great thinkers about America like Emerson and Tocqueville inform our political consciousness, or discussing the way that beauty informs and disciplines daily life, Robinson’s peerless prose and boundless humanity are on full display.

The spirit of our times can appear to be one of joyless urgency. As a culture, we have become less interested in the exploration of the glorious mind and more interested in creating and mastering technologies that will yield material well-being. But while cultural pessimism is always fashionable, there is still much to give us hope. In THE GIVENNESS OF THINGS, Marilynne Robinson delivers an impassioned critique of our contemporary society while arguing that reverence must be given to who we are and what we are: creatures of singular interest and value, despite our errors and depredations.

Lila, homeless and alone after years of roaming the countryside, steps inside a small-town Iowa church --- the only available shelter from the rain --- and ignites a romance and a debate that will reshape her life. She becomes the wife of a minister and begins a new existence while trying to make sense of the days of suffering that preceded her newfound security. In LILA, Marilynne Robinson revisits the beloved characters and setting of her Pulitzer Prize-winning GILEAD, and HOME, a National Book Award finalist.

In 10 erudite essays, novelist Marilynne Robinson explores a variety of political, religious and personal subjects, offering a liberal humanist perspective grounded in her Congregationalist faith on some of the dilemmas facing American society.

The Reverend Boughton's hell-raising son, Jack, has come home after 20 years away. Artful and devious in his youth, now an alcoholic carrying two decades worth of secrets, he is perpetually at odds with his traditionalist father, though he remains his most beloved child. As Jack tries to make peace with his father, he begins to forge an intense bond with his sister Glory, herself returning home with a broken heart and turbulent past.

In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames' life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He "preached men into the Civil War," then, at age 50, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle. Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father --- an ardent pacifist --- and his grandfather, whose pistol and bloody shirts, concealed in an army blanket, may be relics from the fight between the abolitionists and those settlers who wanted to vote Kansas into the union as a slave state.