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Gilead

by Marilynne Robinson

ISBN: 0374153892
ISBN-13: 9780374153892
Format: Hardcover

Summary

Marilynne Robinson's long-awaited second novel is named after the town in which it is set: Gilead, Iowa. The time is the 1950s, and John Ames, the town's beloved pastor, is dying of heart disease. Widowed early but recently remarried, John has a very young son. The novel is a final act of love: a letter to the boy, in which he looks back on his own long life, and on the history of his family and its role in America from the Civil War to the present day. In 2005, GILEAD won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

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Media Reviews

"Robinson has composed...a novel as big as a nation, as quiet as thought, and moving as prayer. Matchless and towering."

   -- Kirkus

"The narrative roams and circles, as diaries do, and is largely cerebral, with little forward imperative. In this sort of book all depends on the quality of the contemplation and the charm of the voice. Fortunately, Ames's is original and strong....GILEAD is an almost otherworldly book. Its characters are, to a one, good people trying to do right. Obviously a work of enormous integrity...."    -- Mona Simpson

   -- Atlantic Monthly

"GILEAD is...a John Donne sermon, a compassing of God's body. Telling you its story...wouldn't begin go convey the eerie eloquence of chapters in which concepts cluster as if they were pilgrims, in which distance huddles with otherness, absence with dreaming, and loneliness with mystery....GILEAD is very funny when it wants to be....But the real business of this novel, its healing art, is radiance."    -- John Leonard

   -- Harper\'s

"By book's end..., when a little fire enters his world, the thoughtful Reverend's counsel sharpens, small wounds deepen, and a credible wisdom emerges."

   -- New Yorker

"GILEAD is a beautiful work-demanding, grave and lucid....Gradually, Robinson's novel teaches us how to read it, suggests how we might slow down to walk at its own processional pace, and how we might learn to coddle its many fine details. Nowadays, when so many writers are acclaimed as great stylists, it's hard to make anyone notice when you praise a writer's prose. There is, however, something remarkable about the writing in GILEAD. It's not just a matter of writing well, although Robinson demonstrates that talent on every page....Robinson's words have a spiritual force that's very rare in contemporary fiction...."    -- James Wood

   -- New York Times Book Review

"It's the triumph of GILEAD that the words of an old preacher dying in an obscure midwestern town can take on the weight they do. No matter the reader's religious impulse, no matter if he doesn't have any, whether Ames will be able to forgive and love his enemy becomes an outcome of critical importance....Anatole Broyard's New York Times review of HOUSEKEEPING praised Robinson for her 'close, careful fondness for people that we thought only saints felt.' How deeply gratifying it is to find that, after twenty-three years, she hasn't changed a bit."    -- Kathryn Harrison

   -- Bookforum

Bibliographic Details

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
Published date: 2004
Edition: 1th edition
Size: 6 x 8.75 inches
Weight: 0.9 pounds
Pages: 247

Publisher's Notes

As the Reverend John Ames approaches the hour of his own death, he writes a letter to his son chronicling three previous generations of his family, a story that stretches back to the Civil War and reveals uncomfortable secrets about the family of preachers.

Other Editions

Hardcover - Farrar Straus & Giroux (2004) - from $2.27
Paperback Reprint - St Martins Pr (2006) - from $2.93

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Gilead: A Novel

Robinson, Marilynne

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