Description

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION and THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD

AN OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK

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, DAILY TELEGRAPH

‘A beautiful novel: wise, tender and perfectly measured’ SARAH WATERS

‘A masterpiece’ SUNDAY TIMES

Publisher Review

A novel as big as a nation, as quiet as thought, and moving as prayer. Matchless and towering. * Kirkus Review * 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 * Stunning... there are gems on every page of Gilead, but it is the whole construction that marks it as a great work * Daily Telegraph * Gilead is no less a masterpiece than Housekeeping * Sunday Times * Her poetic, almost biblical style of writing...flows like clear cold water and is full of quiet power while remaining oddly conversational... People say they love these books, and I can see why. Quite how they can do so without discerning within them a serious, deep, patient but modest defence of the Christian proposition, I do not know. -- Peter Hitchens * Mail Online * ...a country of mystical sunsets, abandoned shacks, storms that could have come out of the book of Job, snowstorms that that can take your life within a few feet of your own front door, and wild rivers in which one can be baptized. I said Marilynne Robinson's prose was like clear, cold water and so it is - and sometimes it is about water too - you are never far from its cleansing, chilly power, or from the mysterious rush of the wind, sounding like the ocean in a region impossibly far from any sea. -- Peter Hitchens * Mail Online *