Gilead (Oprah's Book Club): A Novel

Marilynne Robinson

Nov 2004 · Sold by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

About this ebook

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER• OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER• A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • MORE THAN 1 MILLION COPIES SOLD

“Quietly powerful [and] moving.” O, The Oprah Magazine (recommended reading)

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award, GILEAD is a hymn of praise and lamentation to the God-haunted existence that Reverend Ames loves passionately, and from which he will soon part.

In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He "preached men into the Civil War," then, at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle.

Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father--an ardent pacifist--and his grandfather, whose pistol and bloody shirts, concealed in an army blanket, may be relics from the fight between the abolitionists and those settlers who wanted to vote Kansas into the union as a slave state. And he tells a story of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, which are tested in his tender and strained relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friend's wayward son.

This is also the tale of another remarkable vision--not a corporeal vision of God but the vision of life as a wondrously strange creation. It tells how wisdom was forged in Ames's soul during his solitary life, and how history lives through generations, pervasively present even when betrayed and forgotten.

Ratings and reviews

There is great poetry in this book. some truly beautiful moments of thought and dialogue. However, on the whole, I found the read sluggish and uninteresting. The narrator is prone to much repetition with little reward for the constant revisiting of the same thoughts. maybe that's the point. I just found many of the thoughts uninteresting and inconsequential.

one of the finest books that i have read in quite some time, in ever. it is lifesaving.

So very well written

About the author

Marilynne Robinson is the author of the modern classic Housekeeping--winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award--and the nonfiction books Mother Country and The Death of Adam. She teaches at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.