If you liked Lila by Marilynne Robinson, you'll love…

Lila by Marilynne Robinson was published in fall 2014, receiving praise for its poetic prose and quiet intelligence. It's the third in a series of linked novels set in the fictional town of Gilead, Iowa. Lila, like the earlier books, probes issues of loss, love and faith that flow under the surface of the character's lives.  

If you liked Lila, The Next Chapter columnist Donna Bailey Nurse says you'll love the Canadian novel Clara Callan by Richard B. Wright, which won the Giller Prize when it was published in 2001.

WHY LILA IS A POWERFUL BOOK:

"Marilynne Robinson is very religious, but not in a heavy handed way. She connects spirituality to our secular lives and makes us feel empowered and it reminds us of the sacredness of our everyday lives. In Lila, Robinson takes on hypocrisy about American values. America is supposed to be a very Christian country and America is considered to be the land of the free and the land of opportunity. She also takes on hypocrisy when it comes to race. In Lila, she's saying these people are outside, on the fringes, where there is so much poverty. It speaks to our time today, of course. There's so much poverty today. How can this be happening in such a land of opportunity? As she is a Christian, how can Christians not be reaching out and doing something about it?"

WHY READERS WHO LIKED LILA SHOULD READ CLARA CALLAN:

"These two female characters - Lila and Clara Callan - are women we think that perhaps we know. Perhaps I took for granted that I understood what was going to happen, and in both stories I was totally taken by surprise. Particularly in Clara Callan. This is a woman living on her own in the 1930s, she's a schoolteacher in small-town Ontario. This is a type and he just blows the type right up and shows us there really is no type. In Lila, the character turns to the Word and gains faith. What happens in this novel is that Clara loses her faith and turns away from the sacred Word, but at the same time she turns to poetry, she turns to novels as a means to finding deep meaning in her life. She thinks about the war, she thinks about race, she thinks about women's lives. It's so much bigger and more human and perhaps more human than we tend to think of it."

Donna Bailey Nurse's comments have been condensed and edited.