Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Author: Marilynne Robinson Genre: Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Classics Synopsis: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award, Gilead is the second novel by Marilynne Robinson, one of our finest writers. It is a hymn of praise and lamentation to the God-haunted existence that its narrator loves passionately, and from which he will soon part. In 1956, toward the end of his life, the Reverend John Ames begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowa preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and went 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, later losing his right eye in battle. Reverend Ames writes about the tension between his father—an ardent pacifist—and his grandfather, whose pistol and bloody shirts, concealed in an army blanket, may be rel