Ayad Akhtar is the author of the novel American Dervish. One of three books on faith in the U.S. that he tagged for NPR:
Gilead
by Marilynne Robinson
Marilyn Robinson's Gilead won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2005. Not since Jonathan Edwards and Herman Melville has American prose been so deeply infused with an understanding of faith's capacity to illuminate daily life with shimmering wonder