A monk leaves the monastery to search for his teenage brother, who has run away from home in the middle of a high school cross-country race. Alternating between each brother's perspective, Pilgrims follows its protagonists as they encounter Appalachian Trail thru-hikers, greyhound rescuers, eccentric communists, and tiny cemetery-keepers. A rumination on abandonment and the intimacies we've lost to a world obsessed with progress and material success, Pilgrims announces the arrival of a striking new voice in American fiction.

Devin Kelly is a high school teacher in New York City. He writes the newsletter Ordinary Plots, and his work has appeared in The Guardian, Longreads, LitHub, The Year's Best Sportswriting, and more. Pilgrims is his first novel.

"The hallmark of a great novel, for me, is if I have found myself so immersed in the world that when I look up from the book, when I walk through my actual present life, it still feels as though I can see the scenes from the book everywhere, I can still feel like I am deep in the lives of the people within the narrative. Devin Kelly has achieved something impressive with Pilgrims, which is rich, immersive, and textured in such a way that will be moving alongside me for months to come." — Hanif Abdurraqib, author of There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

"Pilgrims is a novel of immense grace. It's one of the greatest novels of this new century." — Bud Smith, author of Teenager

"From the first to the last page, Devin Kelly has written a novel exquisitely and wrenchingly beautiful. Pilgrims is a prayer, a quest for understanding and forgiveness in a frayed family. This is a love song. A stunning book you must read." — Victoria Redel, author of I Am You

"Pilgrims is a deep, soulful, heartbreaking novel—I'd believe you if you told me it was a swan song instead of a debut, it's so wise and steady. Kelly's sentences are like clear, frozen ponds with dark fish darting underneath." — Daniel Hornsby, author of Sucker and Via Negativa