From the Pulitzer Prize-winner: the second installment, following Some Luck, of her widely acclaimed, best-selling American trilogy, which brings the journey of a remarkable family with roots in the Iowa heartland into mid-century America. Family patriarch Walter Langdon has died, and his children have fanned out across the country. The narrative moves year by year from 1953 to 1986, encompassing Cold War blinkeredness, Sixties rebellion, and escalating...

"Broken Wheel, Iowa, has never seen anyone like Sara, who traveled all the way from Sweden just to meet her pen pal, Amy. When she arrives, however, she finds that Amy's funeral has just ended. Luckily, the townspeople are happy to look after their bewildered tourist--even if they don't understand her peculiar need for books. Marooned in a farm town that's almost beyond repair, Sara starts a bookstore in honor of her friend's memory. All she wants...

On their farm in Denby, Iowa, Rosanna and Walter Langdon abide by time-honored values that they pass on to their five wildly different children. Beginning in 1920, as American soldiers like Walter return from World War I, and going up through the early 1950s, with the country on the cusp of enormous social and economic change, the personal and the historical merge seamlessly in the Langdons' story.

Glory Boughton, aged thirty-eight, has returned to Gilead to care for her dying father. Soon her brother, Jack--the prodigal son of the family, gone for twenty years--comes home too, looking for refuge and trying to make peace with a past littered with tormenting trouble and pain.

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK

MORE THAN 1 MILLION COPIES SOLD
"Quietly powerful [and] moving." O, The Oprah Magazine (recommended reading)
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award, GILEAD is a

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"From the Pulitzer Prize-winner: the much-anticipated final volume of her magnificent, best-selling American trilogy, which brings the beloved Langdon family into our present times and beyond. A lot can happen in 100 years, as Jane Smiley has shown to dazzling effect in her astonishing, critically acclaimed Last Hundred Years Trilogy. When Golden Age, its last installment, opens in 1987, the next generation of the Langdon family is facing economic,...

After being involved in a drunk driving accident in the spring, Paige Sheridan spends the summer in Paris as an au-pair and then returns to her suburban Iowa existence for her senior year of high school, where she begins to wonder if she wants more out life than being popular, having a handsome boyfriend and all the latest clothes, and being a member of the social elite.

"In the space of a few torrid months on the Iowa prairie, Phillipa Maakestad--long-married theater professor and mother of an unstable daughter--grapples with a life turned upside down. After falling headlong into a passionate affair during a semester spent teaching in Ohio, Phillipa returns home to Iowa for her daughter Ginny's wedding. There, Phillipa must endure (among other things) a wedding-day tornado, a menace of a mother-in-law who may or...

Marilynne Robinson's mythical world of Gilead, Iowa--the setting of her novels Gilead, Home, and Lila, and now Jack--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 Robinson's 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...

Twelve-year-old Jewel was born on the day her brother Bird died and lives in a house of silence and secrets, but a new boy in her Iowa town may help find the answers Jewel wants despite her Jamaican grandfather's warning that he is a "duppy," a malevolent spirit.