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Pilgrims
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.
236 pages, Paperback
Published November 18, 2025
5 people are currently reading
88 people want to read
About the author
Devin Kelly
14 books35 followersDevin 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.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
December 31, 2025
Loved loved loved. My favorite book of 2025 BY FAR
November 28, 2025
Felt like reading a long lovely poem
December 28, 2025
i’ve been a fan of devin kelly for almost ten years now and i just love his writing. i also love books sort of about religion. reminded me of bridge of clay by markus zusak.
December 14, 2025
I love the poetic narrative that is Pilgrims. Get yourself a copy. Parts that speak to me:
Wanting the world to be smaller. Rejecting the hustle.
“There’s a brutality to life, I said. Maybe not life. But life, yeah. People want to attack it. Like, they really want to attack it. It all becomes work and warfare. Every employer - I gestured out Stilts’s window - is saying first year salary this, starting salary that. They promise more money in a year than I ever thought possible, and then I still bet when Stu or anyone gets that job, they’ll complain about it all. They’ll say what they say on campus when they’re up late in the library. ‘This shit sucks me dry. this shi kills.’ I want nothing of that world. It’s so mean. But everyone lives in it.”
The tree of legend by the river (Twirl a Tree or Upright Boat or Two Trees, Two Brothers or Two Sisters) and what it represents.
“Really, I felt like the tree rooted in the water, its limb caught in a wild and strained reach across the river. Hoping for closeness, not finding it. “
The notion that there is wisdom to be had wherever you go, from the bus driver and the gas station attendant.
The exploration of the examination of self in silence. “I just am.”
Forgiveness vs. grace, from the character Evan, who is rolling his way across the country in his wheelchair.
“Grace is an exercise in the limitlessness of acceptance. It is what happens when you accept how conditional people are, and then move your heart toward the unconditional.”
Daily acts of witness.
From Bobby, the main character. “At a certain point, you have to commit to your place within this place. To your daily act of witness. Your bread-making, your listening, your going-out-to-look-at-the-moon. And you make of that your life. People get tired of hearing there’s somewhere better than where you are. So they try to make where they are better. They wake up and stack the biscotti.”
From Evan. “Our world, he said, wants us to stay on the fucking road, because anyone who has any power knows that’s where they can keep us! To keep us as lost souls! Herding! Toward! Some proclaimed! Good! When they keep us there, we lose our power! We can’t do anything. We tell ourselves to love the in between. We meditate to keep our anxious minds at bay. We don’t have to do that! We can find a here right here. We don’t have to always be going there.”
The reflection of blood vs family, from the character Billy.
“And yet, despite these facts, the fact of leaving and the fact of the screaming the hitting, the yelling, you still feel a slight pull toward them. No, it’s not slight. It’s of the universe, like the tides. A massive pull beyond description. You want to run after the car that leaves. Hold the man who hurts you. What causes this other than magic? Blood is a thing you cannot choose, but it holds you. Damnit, it does.”
Wanting the world to be smaller. Rejecting the hustle.
“There’s a brutality to life, I said. Maybe not life. But life, yeah. People want to attack it. Like, they really want to attack it. It all becomes work and warfare. Every employer - I gestured out Stilts’s window - is saying first year salary this, starting salary that. They promise more money in a year than I ever thought possible, and then I still bet when Stu or anyone gets that job, they’ll complain about it all. They’ll say what they say on campus when they’re up late in the library. ‘This shit sucks me dry. this shi kills.’ I want nothing of that world. It’s so mean. But everyone lives in it.”
The tree of legend by the river (Twirl a Tree or Upright Boat or Two Trees, Two Brothers or Two Sisters) and what it represents.
“Really, I felt like the tree rooted in the water, its limb caught in a wild and strained reach across the river. Hoping for closeness, not finding it. “
The notion that there is wisdom to be had wherever you go, from the bus driver and the gas station attendant.
The exploration of the examination of self in silence. “I just am.”
Forgiveness vs. grace, from the character Evan, who is rolling his way across the country in his wheelchair.
“Grace is an exercise in the limitlessness of acceptance. It is what happens when you accept how conditional people are, and then move your heart toward the unconditional.”
Daily acts of witness.
From Bobby, the main character. “At a certain point, you have to commit to your place within this place. To your daily act of witness. Your bread-making, your listening, your going-out-to-look-at-the-moon. And you make of that your life. People get tired of hearing there’s somewhere better than where you are. So they try to make where they are better. They wake up and stack the biscotti.”
From Evan. “Our world, he said, wants us to stay on the fucking road, because anyone who has any power knows that’s where they can keep us! To keep us as lost souls! Herding! Toward! Some proclaimed! Good! When they keep us there, we lose our power! We can’t do anything. We tell ourselves to love the in between. We meditate to keep our anxious minds at bay. We don’t have to do that! We can find a here right here. We don’t have to always be going there.”
The reflection of blood vs family, from the character Billy.
“And yet, despite these facts, the fact of leaving and the fact of the screaming the hitting, the yelling, you still feel a slight pull toward them. No, it’s not slight. It’s of the universe, like the tides. A massive pull beyond description. You want to run after the car that leaves. Hold the man who hurts you. What causes this other than magic? Blood is a thing you cannot choose, but it holds you. Damnit, it does.”
January 15, 2026
A generous novel, both intimate and expansive. Two brothers in first-person narrative wend their way along quiet paths that variously deviate from and towards the lives of others; the story's restrained action yields to a wider mission of exploring the soul-level depths of its characters and the world.
Runners, bakers, monks, siblings, parents, addicts and those who love them, dog rescuers, AT hikers, denizens of the road, those who have left and those who have been left are all represented, in spare and lyrical prose. Readers of Devin Kelly's Ordinary Plots will find his inimitable sense of wonder intact here, and will recognize his awesome, boundless heart on every page.
Certain stylistic choices were more precious than I prefer (heavy on sentence fragments, light on question marks after questions, a tendency towards epistolary and artifactual background...), but those are personal biases, and the intentionality of such choices was not lost on me.
Incidentally, Pilgrims was a nightly balm during the hideous days of early 2026 in American & global politics, the way Ordinary Plots' weekly dispatches have been for me for several years. Kelly is among a handful of thinkers and writers whose work I feel grateful to live alongside in time.
Runners, bakers, monks, siblings, parents, addicts and those who love them, dog rescuers, AT hikers, denizens of the road, those who have left and those who have been left are all represented, in spare and lyrical prose. Readers of Devin Kelly's Ordinary Plots will find his inimitable sense of wonder intact here, and will recognize his awesome, boundless heart on every page.
Certain stylistic choices were more precious than I prefer (heavy on sentence fragments, light on question marks after questions, a tendency towards epistolary and artifactual background...), but those are personal biases, and the intentionality of such choices was not lost on me.
Incidentally, Pilgrims was a nightly balm during the hideous days of early 2026 in American & global politics, the way Ordinary Plots' weekly dispatches have been for me for several years. Kelly is among a handful of thinkers and writers whose work I feel grateful to live alongside in time.
December 15, 2025
Pilgrims curled up in my heart like a warm, sleeping kitten on a cold day. Its teachings were as gentle as they were powerful, the characters will fill you with recognition no matter your experiences. The protagonist's decision to flee to a monastery, for reasons of escape and the search of peace (and to no longer be held hostage to his phone) more than religion has become a tempting idea. The book reads like poetry and is both painful and hopeful. I read it slowly to savor, and cherished the characters introduced throughout, which I appreciated that the came both in the beginning, the middle and the end. It's a story about family and loss and hope, and Devin's ability to gently reach the reader through this unique story is effective, generous, and much needed in these times.
As the book reads:
'Every waking minute, someone is doing something somewhere almost solely out of love. You have to decide to witness it, decide to pay attention to these acts - because it takes some looking before what seems ordinary becomes extraordinary.'
As the book reads:
'Every waking minute, someone is doing something somewhere almost solely out of love. You have to decide to witness it, decide to pay attention to these acts - because it takes some looking before what seems ordinary becomes extraordinary.'
December 28, 2025
I’ve come across a handful of books in my life that I call watershed books. They’re the ones that altered my understanding of literature and life at once. Fight Club when I was 19. Tom Spanbauer’s I Loved You More when I was 29. Lauren Groff’s The Vaster Wilds when I was 38, and now Pilgrims just after turning 40.
This is a perfect novel. Existential and profound. Funny and heart-wrenching. It asks enormous, cosmic questions, and provides deep and satisfying comfort in the unknowability of the answers—if the answers even exist at all. Devin Kelly has become one of my all-time favorite writers with this one. What a massive, extraordinary triumph.
This is a perfect novel. Existential and profound. Funny and heart-wrenching. It asks enormous, cosmic questions, and provides deep and satisfying comfort in the unknowability of the answers—if the answers even exist at all. Devin Kelly has become one of my all-time favorite writers with this one. What a massive, extraordinary triumph.
December 14, 2025
What an astounding novel! This book touched on so many things that matter to me in life, and because of this, and the profound storytelling, I was drawn in from the first page. What a wonderful debut novel. Put it at the top of your stack of books to be read!!
January 11, 2026
Reading Pilgrims is a fulfilling engagement in questions about soul work. Soul work as the condition of aliveness and the task of living and loving. Beautiful writing and format of narrative. I strongly recommend this book as a reading experience.
December 28, 2025
Beautiful, lyrical writing. A book you’ll want to earmark pages and circle passsages!
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews