Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2005, Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead is the story of John Ames, a preacher, who has inherited his father’s and grandfather’s mantle.
In 1956, towards the end of Reverend John Ames’s life, he begins a letter to his young son: ‘I told you last night that I might be gone sometime . . . You reached up and put your fingers on my lips and gave me that look I never in my life saw on any other face besides your mother’s. It’s a kind of furious pride, very passionate and stern. I’m always a little surprised to find my eyebrows unsinged after I’ve suffered one of those looks. I will miss them.’
‘Writing of this quality, with an authority as unforced as the perfect pitch in music, is rare and carries with it a sense almost of danger’ Daily Telegraph
‘A beautiful novel: wise, tender and perfectly measured’ Sarah Waters
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Once in a blue moon an encounter with a new book can be like falling in love – you just know, instinctively, that you’ve found a voice that’s entirely sympathetic, and that you want to spend...
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