Details
Synopsis
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.
| Size | | Length: | 247 pages | | Height: | 8.3 in | | Width: | 5.8 in | | Thickness: | 0.5 in | | Weight: | 8.0 oz |
Publisher's Notes
First Line: "I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where,and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why, and I said, Because I'm old, and you said, I don't think you're old."
Industry Reviews
"Robinson has composed...a novel as big as a nation, as quiet as thought, and moving as prayer. Matchless and towering."
Kirkus (08/15/2004)
"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...."
Atlantic Monthly - Mona Simpson (12/01/2004)
"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 (11/22/2004)
"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."
Harper's - John Leonard (12/01/2004)
"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...."
New York Times Book Review - James Wood (11/18/2004)
"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."
Bookforum - Kathryn Harrison
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