Jack By Marilynne Robinson

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
Guardian – Sarah Perry

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
Sunday Times – Bryan Appleyard

The fourth in Robinson's luminous, profound Gilead series and perhaps the best yet, a sad story about love, race and midwestern mores
Observer

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
Atlantic – Jordan Kisner

Marilynne Robinson's novel has some of the beats of a romantic comedy. The principals are charismatic, their conversation sparky. Jack can be read as a stand-alone, but the book gains much from what many readers will bring to it of their knowledge of its central character from his appearances in the trilogy of novels that preceded this one. Every time Robinson tells this story, it is both a better story and truer
Telegraph – Dr Nikhil Krishnan

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
The i – Susie Mesure

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
Financial Times – Erica Wagner

It is an immensely satisfying and bittersweet end to an astonishing series. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about these four books taken as a whole is the whole-hearted commitment to the novel as a moral endeavour. They are beautiful, and they are true
Scotsman – Stuart Kelly

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
Literary Review – Nonnie Minogue

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 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
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