'[Her work] defines universal truths about what it means to be human' Barack Obama
'Marilynne Robinson is one of the greatest writers of our time' Sunday Times
'Jack is the fourth in Robinson's luminous, profound Gilead series and perhaps the best yet' Observer
Marilynne Robinson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the American National Humanities Medal, returns to the world of Gilead with Jack, the final in one of the great works of contemporary American fiction.
Jack tells the story of John Ames Boughton, the loved and grieved-over prodigal son of a Presbyterian minister in Gilead, Iowa, a drunkard and a ne'er-do-well. In segregated St. Louis sometime after World War II, Jack falls in love with Della Miles, an African-American high school teacher, also a preacher's child, with a discriminating mind, a generous spirit and an independent will. Their fraught, beautiful story is one of Robinson's greatest achievements.
Read MoreMarilynne Robinson is one of the greatest writers of our time. In 2008 I concluded my article: "I'm not saying that you're actually dead if you haven't read Marilynne Robinson, but I honestly couldn't say you're fully alive." I have not changed my mind - Sunday TimesRadiant and visionary, the fourth Gilead novel explores whether a minister's prodigal son can be redeemed by love . . . [Marilynne Robinson is] a writer of magisterial wisdom and skill . . . This has been Robinson's project: to perceive "this teeming world", as she puts it, "so steeped in its sins", and all the same to insist on what is best and loveliest - GuardianIt could be said that the attempt to understand how things are is at the heart of Robinson's remarkable body of work. Jack fits beautifully into the subtle weave of Robinson's Gilead books; that said, it could perfectly well be read on its own - Financial TimesEach of [Robinson's] novels has celebrated the fact that the ineffable is inseparable from the quotidian, and rendered the ineffable, quotidian world back to us, peculiar, luminous and precise - Atlantic