Jack (Thorndike Press Large Print Basic: Gilead),Used

About the AuthorMarilynne Robinson is the recipient of a 2012 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama, for her grace and intelligence in writing. She is the author of Gilead, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Home, winner of the Orange Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Lila, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her first novel, Housekeeping, won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. Robinson's nonfiction books include The Givenness of Things, When I Was a Child I Read Books, Absence of Mind, The Death of Adam, and Mother Country. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.Product DescriptionA New York Times bestsellerMarilynne Robinson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, returns to the world of Gilead with Jack, the latest novel in one of the great works of contemporary American fictionMarilynne Robinson's mythical world of Gilead, Iowathe setting of her novels Gilead, Home, and Lila, and now Jackand 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 Robinson's fourth novel in this nowclassic 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, starcrossed interracial romance resonates with all the paradoxes of American life, then and now.Robinson's Gilead novels, which have won one Pulitzer Prize and two National Book Critics Circle Awards, are a vital contribution to contemporary American literature and a revelation of our national character and humanity.ReviewFor Marilynne Robinson's devotees, John Ames Boughton, the titular Jack of the fourth volume of her awardwinning Gilead novels, is one of the most eagerly awaited literary figures since Godot. . . Robinson is acclaimed for her numinous accounts of faith, forgiveness and hope, but read in this electrifying year of national crisis, the Gilead books are unified as well by her unsparing indictment of the American history of racism and inequality, and Christianity's uneven will to fight them . . . I am looking forward to a fifth volume that will fill in their saga, and I hope it will be called Della." Elaine Showalter, The New York Times Book ReviewJack is the fourth novel in Robinson's Gilead series, an intergenerational saga of race, religion, family, and forgiveness centered on a small Iowa town. But it is not accurate to call it a sequel or a prequel. Rather, this book and the othersGilead, Home, and Lilaare more like the Gospels, telling the same story four different ways . . . At seventysix, she is still trying to convince the rest of us that her habit of looking backward isn't retrograde but radical, and that this country's history, so often seen now as the source of our discontents, contains their remedy, too." Casey Cep, The New YorkerIn Gilead, the first volume, the Rev. John Ames writes that 'a good sermon is one side of a passionate conversation, ' and Ms. Robinson's novels work that way, too, replying to one another, querying, clarifying or rebutting, but always sustaining a dialogue that feels as grand and as inexhaustible as the mysteries they explore . . . These novels honor creation by affording us something we only occasionally find in the vastness of existence: a glimpse of eternity, such as it is. Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal"With the sublime Jack, [Marilynne Robinson] resumes and deepens her quest, extending it to the contemplation of race . . . Robinson masterfully allows her protagonists to do the heavy lifting of the storytelling and employs deceptively simple dialogue as her primary tool. But make no mistakethere is richness and depth at every turn. The odds are stacked against this lovestruck couple