What are We Doing Here?

New essays by the Orange and Pulitzer Prize winning author of Gilead , Home and Lila. In this collection, Marilynne Robinson, one of today's most important thinkers - admired by President Obama, and so many others - impels us to action and offers us hope.

Robinson urges her audience to stand by what makes us human - "creative, knowing, efficacious, deeply capable of loyalty". The argument is sophisticated and persuasive

A bracing, stringent book that continually challenges the reader

There is much rich matter in these essays. They are simultaneously challenging, disturbing and rewarding

Marilynne Robinson is the author of Gilead, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Home, winner of the Orange Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Lila, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Jack, a New York Times bestseller. Her first novel, Housekeeping, won the PEN/Hemingway Award. Robinson's non-fiction books include The Givenness of Things, When I Was a Child I Read Books, Absence of Mind, The Death of Adam, and Mother Country. She is the recipient of a 2012 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama, for 'her grace and intelligence in writing.' Robinson lives in Iowa City, Iowa.