Plainsong

The fictional town of Holt, Colorado, on the High Plains east of Denver, is the setting for Kent Haruf's novel of interlocking lives. Tom Guthrie, a high school history teacher, is left to raise his young sons, Ike and Bobby, as his wife withdraws to her bedroom. Victoria Roubideaux, one of his pupils, is pregnant and turned out by her mother, with nowhere to go. In the country, the elderly bachelor brothers Raymond and Harold McPheron work the homestead they have always known. The title names a plain church chant, a nod to the plains and the spare prose. Published in 1999, it was a National Book Award finalist.

It appears on a published list of every book Barack Obama recommended during his presidency.