Reading List

Authors Like Marilynne Robinson

Q: What should I read after Gilead?

Robinson’s own Home (2008), which covers the same months from the Boughton household. After that, try Kent Haruf’s Plainsong (1999), or Jon Fosse’s Septology for another old man thinking about God and memory.

Q: Does Marilynne Robinson have a new book?

Her most recent book is Reading Genesis (2024), a close reading of the first book of the Bible. No new novel has been announced; her latest novel is Jack (2020).

Q: Which Marilynne Robinson book should I read first?

Gilead (2004), which won the Pulitzer Prize and opens the four novels set in the same Iowa town. Housekeeping (1980), her first novel, is the better choice if you prefer landscape and sisters to theology.

Housekeeping (1980) is narrated by Ruth, who grows up in Fingerbone, Idaho, a town on a lake into which her grandfather’s train once slid from a trestle bridge, and where her mother later drove off a cliff into the same water. It won the PEN/Hemingway Award. Marilynne Robinson did not publish another novel for twenty-four years. When she did, Gilead (2004) was a letter written in 1956 by John Ames, a 76-year-old Congregationalist minister in Iowa with a failing heart, to his seven-year-old son; it won the Pulitzer Prize. Home, Lila and Jack followed, all set in the same small town. In 2015 Barack Obama interviewed her for The New York Review of Books. The ten writers below share her ground: faith taken seriously, small places looked at closely, and people trying, not always successfully, to be good to one another.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Literary fiction · Faith and small towns · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love Marilynne Robinson, start with Kent Haruf, a Methodist minister’s son whose Plainsong (1999) gives a small Colorado town the same patient attention. Elizabeth Strout’s Abide with Me (2006) follows a minister in a small Maine town, and Wendell Berry’s Port William novels share her faith in a place and its people. The list also reaches back to George Eliot, who translated the Feuerbach book that John Ames is given in Gilead.

10 authors like Marilynne Robinson

The novelist who translated Feuerbach

George Eliot

British · Adam Bede (1859), Middlemarch (1871–72)

George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, born in Warwickshire in 1819. Having given up the evangelical faith of her youth, she translated David Strauss’s Life of Jesus (1846) and Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1854) before she wrote fiction. Middlemarch follows the lives of a provincial town around 1830. She died in 1880.

Eliot translated The Essence of Christianity, the book that unsettles and then steadies John Ames in Gilead. Both novelists write about faith from close knowledge of it, and both find moral drama in a provincial town where little seems to happen.

— Lisanne

Every book by George Eliot →

Prairie lives, plainly told

Willa Cather

American · O Pioneers! (1913), My Ántonia (1918), Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)

Cather was born in Virginia in 1873 and moved with her family to Nebraska at nine, settling in Red Cloud. My Ántonia is narrated by a man remembering a Bohemian immigrant girl on the Nebraska prairie; Death Comes for the Archbishop follows two French priests in New Mexico. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for One of Ours. She died in 1947.

The clearest precedent for Robinson’s American interior: ordinary lives on open land, written with restraint and reverence. Death Comes for the Archbishop is also, like Gilead, a novel about a clergyman growing old in his work.

— Lisanne

Every book by Willa Cather →

Faith, from inside the church

James Baldwin

American · Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), The Fire Next Time (1963)

Baldwin was born in Harlem in 1924 and preached in a Pentecostal church as a teenager before leaving it. Go Tell It on the Mountain takes place on John Grimes’s fourteenth birthday in Harlem and in the prayers of his family; The Fire Next Time is a pair of essays on race and religion in America. He spent much of his life in France and died there in 1987.

The writer who complicates Robinson’s gentle Protestantism. Baldwin knew the church as intimately as she does and wrote about it as a place of refuge and of control. Read him alongside Jack, her novel about a white man’s love for a Black woman in segregated St. Louis.

— Lisanne

Every book by James Baldwin →

Grace, with violence

Flannery O'Connor

American · Wise Blood (1952), A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955)

O’Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1925 and lived most of her adult life on her family’s farm near Milledgeville; she died of lupus in 1964, aged 39. The Complete Stories won the National Book Award in 1972. In 2020 Loyola University Maryland renamed a residence hall named after her, citing racist remarks in her private letters.

A Christian writer who takes grace as seriously as Robinson does but finds it in violence and shock rather than quiet attention. O’Connor was Catholic and Robinson writes from the Calvinist tradition; side by side they show how differently faith can be written.

— Lisanne

Belonging to a place

Wendell Berry

American · Jayber Crow (2000), Hannah Coulter (2004)

Berry was born in Kentucky in 1934 and has farmed in Henry County since the 1960s. His novels and stories are set in Port William, an imagined Kentucky river town; Jayber Crow is narrated by its barber, Hannah Coulter by a widow looking back on two marriages. He received the National Humanities Medal in 2010.

Port William and Gilead are close neighbours: small Protestant communities, narrators looking back from old age, and the belief that loving a place is a moral act. Berry is more political about land and farming; Robinson more theological.

— Lisanne

Every book by Wendell Berry →

A small town, attended to

Kent Haruf

American · Plainsong (1999), Benediction (2013), Our Souls at Night (2015)

Haruf was born in Pueblo, Colorado, in 1943, the son of a Methodist minister, and earned his MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1973. His novels are set in Holt, an invented town on the Colorado plains; Plainsong was a National Book Award finalist and Benediction was shortlisted for the Folio Prize. Our Souls at Night was published after his death in 2014.

The closest match in tone: plain sentences, decent people, and kindness treated as the main event. Haruf leaves faith implicit where Robinson makes it the subject, which makes him a gentle route into her world or out of it.

— Lisanne

Every book by Kent Haruf →

A minister and his town

Elizabeth Strout

American · Abide with Me (2006), Olive Kitteridge (2008), My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016)

Strout was born in Portland, Maine, in 1956. Abide with Me follows Tyler Caskey, the minister of the small town of West Annett, Maine; Olive Kitteridge, linked stories centred on a retired schoolteacher, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009.

Abide with Me is the natural companion to Gilead: a minister, his private struggles, and a town that watches him. Strout is sharper about gossip and loneliness, Robinson more interested in the minister’s inner life.

— Lisanne

Every book by Elizabeth Strout →

A theology of attention

Annie Dillard

American · Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), Holy the Firm (1977)

Dillard was born in Pittsburgh in 1945. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a year of close observation in a Virginia valley in the Blue Ridge, won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1975. Holy the Firm asks how a good God can allow suffering, prompted by a child badly burned in a plane crash.

The nonfiction twin of Robinson’s way of seeing: light, water and ordinary creatures as evidence of something holy. Read Dillard if what you love in Gilead is Ames’s attention to the world rather than his story.

— Lisanne

Every book by Annie Dillard →

Prayer in long sentences

Jon Fosse

Norwegian · Morning and Evening (2000), Septology (2019–2021)

Fosse was born in Haugesund, Norway, in 1959 and is best known as a playwright. Septology, a seven-part novel written as a single unbroken sentence, follows an ageing painter named Asle and his double; it was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2022. He became a Catholic in 2013 and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2023.

Like Ames, Fosse’s narrator is an old man thinking about God, art, memory and death in a slow, returning voice. Fosse is stranger and more hypnotic, but the stillness of Gilead is close to the stillness here.

— Lisanne

Small acts of conscience

Claire Keegan

Irish · Foster (2010), Small Things Like These (2021)

Keegan was born in County Wicklow in 1968. Small Things Like These follows Bill Furlong, a coal merchant in the Irish town of New Ross, in the weeks before Christmas 1985, as he discovers what is happening at the local convent’s Magdalene laundry. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction in 2022.

Keegan writes the moment a decent person decides how to act, inside a religious community, in prose as spare as Robinson’s is expansive. Her books are short enough to read in an evening and ask the same questions about goodness.

— Lisanne

Every book by Claire Keegan →

Where to start if you loved Marilynne Robinson

If you loved Gilead, read Kent Haruf.

Plainsong: a small town on the plains, and the people who look after each other.

If you loved John Ames, read Elizabeth Strout.

Abide with Me: a minister, his private struggles and his town.

If you loved Housekeeping, read Annie Dillard.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: water, light and the strangeness of the natural world.

If you want faith argued with, read James Baldwin.

Go Tell It on the Mountain: the church as refuge and as trap.

If you want more Marilynne Robinson, start with Gilead.

Then read Home (2008), Lila (2014) and Jack (2020), which return to the same town and families; Housekeeping (1980) stands on its own.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Marilynne Robinson

Who writes like Marilynne Robinson?

Kent Haruf, Elizabeth Strout and Wendell Berry are the closest. Haruf shares her quiet small-town decency, Strout’s Abide with Me follows a minister in a small Maine town, and Berry’s Port William novels share her faith in a place and its people.

What should I read after Gilead?

Robinson’s own Home (2008), which covers the same months from the Boughton household. After that, try Kent Haruf’s Plainsong (1999), or Jon Fosse’s Septology for another old man thinking about God and memory.

Does Marilynne Robinson have a new book?

Her most recent book is Reading Genesis (2024), a close reading of the first book of the Bible. No new novel has been announced; her latest novel is Jack (2020).

Which Marilynne Robinson book should I read first?

Gilead (2004), which won the Pulitzer Prize and opens the four novels set in the same Iowa town. Housekeeping (1980), her first novel, is the better choice if you prefer landscape and sisters to theology.

Is Marilynne Robinson religious?

Yes. She is a Protestant Christian in the Congregationalist tradition, and her essays defend John Calvin as a thinker worth reading. Faith shapes her novels, but they are written for any attentive reader, not only believers.

Is Marilynne Robinson like Wendell Berry?

Yes, closely. Both write small Protestant communities in the American interior, narrators looking back from old age, and a moral seriousness about place. Berry is more concerned with farming and land; Robinson with theology and the inner life.

Sources

List last reviewed 30 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

Authors Like Marilynne Robinson

10 authors like Marilynne Robinson

George Eliot

Willa Cather

James Baldwin

Flannery O'Connor

Wendell Berry

Kent Haruf

Elizabeth Strout

Annie Dillard

Jon Fosse

Claire Keegan

Where to start if you loved Marilynne Robinson

Frequently asked questions about authors like Marilynne Robinson

Who writes like Marilynne Robinson?

What should I read after Gilead?

Does Marilynne Robinson have a new book?

Which Marilynne Robinson book should I read first?

Is Marilynne Robinson religious?

Is Marilynne Robinson like Wendell Berry?

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