Jack

ABBEY'S BOOKSELLER PICK ----- Readers of any of Robinson's previous 'Gilead' books will welcome this new novel whose central character is Jack, the son of the preacher in the original book (Gilead) and that fills in the gaps of the overarching narrative. It is sometime after the second World War, and Jack is living a miserable drifting life. He is a deep thinker but so self-sabotaging and prickly that he can't accept anything that looks like help or goodness - until he meets schoolteacher Della Miles, an Afro-American of good family and deep faith, who he falls in love with. Even though he wants to be better for her sake, he knows he can only spoil her life, or make his worse, but he truly can't resist hanging around her neighbourhood in the hope of seeing her. Nor can he seem to stick with his resolutions to be a better man, but maybe Della is tired of doing the right thing herself... A layered and nuanced book.  Lindy

If your soul isn't stirred by a novel about Jack, chances are you haven't signed up to the doctrine of Marilynne Robinson, one of America's defining writers . . . Robinson's writing is numinous but never alienating to secular readers, because the issues she tackles are universal, with complicated parent-child dynamics a favourite -- Susie Mesure * The i * In 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 * Wall Street Journal * Jack 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 others - Gilead, Home, and Lila - are more like the Gospels, telling the same story four different ways . . . At seventy-six, 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 * New Yorker * Not just a meditation on faith and human suffering but a singular portrait of the divine -- Leah Greenblatt * Entertainment Weekly * Can love save a man from perdition? That question, braided with romance and religion, is at the heart of Marilynne Robinson's new novel . . . Robinson cradles [Jack's] love for Della with the tenderness of a gracious creator -- Ron Charles * Washington Post * A meditation on human decency and the capacity for redemption * New York Times * It is the strangest beginning of a romance: a night locked in a graveyard in St Louis. And so staggeringly complex, ethereal and witty is the dialogue and interaction between the two principle players . . . we are with them through every minute of their blossoming connection. This is the fourth in Marilynne Robinson's magnificent Gilead series and delves deep into the heart of the American spirit * Sainsbury's magazine * Robinson has won multiple awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her latest novel, the fourth in the Gilead series, is the story of the fraught but life-changing relationship between John Ames Boughton, a white man who has recently been released from prison, and Delia Miles, an African American teacher, in 1950s St Louis * Good Housekeeping * the rare treat of a new novel from Marilynne Robinson * Guardian * This is a sunnier book than anyone might have expected, an unlikely love story, both funny and sublime: we see two souls awakening to love in that down-to-earth yet transcendent vein that is Robinson's special hallmark -- Nonnie Minogue * Literary Review * It 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 -- Erica Wagner * Financial Times * Jack Boughton has been present, even when he was painfully absent, throughout Robinson's profound saga and now he steps forward to illuminate the hidden facets of his peripatetic life of lies, thievery, bad luck and dangerous love. Robinson's latest glorious work of metaphysical and moral inquiry, nuanced feelings, intricate imagination and exquisite sensuousness begins at night inside the locked gates of a St. Louis cemetery where Jack, an alcoholic, sarcastic and self-loathing white man living rough, encounters the woman he loves, Della Miles, who is a disciplined, poetry-loving, Black and a devoted high school history teacher . . . Myriad manifestations of pain are evoked, but here, too, are beauty, humour, mystery and joy as Robinson holds us rapt with the exactitude of her perceptions and the exhilaration of her hymnal cadence, and so gracefully elucidates the complex sorrows and wonders of life and spirit * Booklist * A sometimes tender, sometimes fraught story of interracial love in a time of trouble . . . The story flows swiftly- and without a hint of inevitability - as Robinson explores a favorite theme, 'guilt and grace met together'. An elegantly written proof of the thesis that love conquers all - but not without considerable pain * Kirkus (starred review) * Each 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 . . . There are passages when Jack's eye glimmers so clearly on the moment, when his dream logic feels so apt, that the whole world Robinson has illuminated with such care and attention reappears, and we are returned to the prophetic everyday -- Jordan Kisner * Atlantic * The fourth in Robinson's luminous, profound Gilead series and perhaps the best yet, a sad story about love, race and midwestern mores * Observer * Marilynne 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 -- Bryan Appleyard * Sunday Times * Radiant 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 -- Sarah Perry * Guardian *