East of Eden by John Steinbeck (1952)

Lee, the cook in a Salinas Valley household and its quiet philosopher, spends years learning ancient Hebrew to settle one verb, because the word God speaks to Cain will decide whether a man is doomed. The King James Bible reads it as a promise, that a man shall master sin; another makes it a command, that he must. Lee's answer is a third: timshel, thou mayest, a door left open rather than a sentence passed. John Steinbeck folded his own mother's people, the laughing, grieving Hamiltons, into one half of this book and a lineage of inherited cruelty, the Trasks, into the other, and wrote the whole of it as a letter to his two sons. The gift inside is the most consoling idea in American fiction: that no child is condemned to repeat the father, that the worst running in your blood can still be refused. The verb is not thou shalt and not thou must but thou mayest, and the book shakes with the glory of a door no one can close on you.