Gilead

Written as one long letter, Marilynne Robinson's second novel is the testament of Reverend John Ames, a 76-year-old Congregationalist pastor in the small town of Gilead, Iowa, who knows in 1956 that a heart condition will soon end his life. He writes to his young son, who is unlikely to remember him well, about his forebears: a grandfather who moved west to Kansas to fight slavery and lost an eye as a Union chaplain, and a father who became an ardent pacifist. The bond between fathers and sons is tested again in Ames's uneasy relationship with Jack Boughton, his namesake and his best friend's wayward son. The novel received the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

It appears on a list of every book Barack Obama recommended during his presidency, and Corning CEO Wendell P. Weeks named it in a What CEOs are reading roundup.