Gilead

Winner of the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award
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.'
'A visionary work of dazzling originality' Robert McCrum, Observer
'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' Jane Shilling, Sunday Telegraph
'It is difficult not to be awed, moved and ultimately humbled' Neel Mukherjee, The Times
'A great work of literature' John de Falbe, Daily Telegraph
Chosen by the New York Times Book Review as one of the top six novels of the year

Marilynne Robinson is the author of Gilead, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Home, winner of the Orange Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Lila, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Jack, a New York Times bestseller. Her first novel, Housekeeping, won the PEN/Hemingway Award. Robinson's non-fiction books include The Givenness of Things, When I Was a Child I Read Books, Absence of Mind, The Death of Adam, and Mother Country. She is the recipient of a 2012 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama, for 'her grace and intelligence in writing.' Robinson lives in Iowa City, Iowa.

Gilead is no less a masterpiece than Housekeeping Sunday Times Stunning... there are gems on every page of Gilead, but it is the whole construction that marks it as a great work Daily Telegraph The slow pulse of Robinson's writing slows the reader's eye and mind, and creates in the reading process a literary version of the narrator's spiritual experience. Gilead reminds us that words have power to spare, to forgive, to do justice Independent A novel as big as a nation, as quiet as thought, and moving as prayer. Matchless and towering. Kirkus Review