Gilead

By Marilynne Robinson

Subjects: Fathers and sons, Domestic fiction, Fiction, family life, general, Open Library Staff Picks, Children of clergy, Large type books, Father-son relationship, Grandfathers, Memory, Old age, award:national_book_critics_circle_award=2004, Fiction, family life, award:national_book_critics_circle_award=fiction, Iowa, fiction, Christian fiction, Fathers and sons, fiction, Fiction, American fiction (fictional works by one author), Clergy, National Book Critics Circle Award Winner, Grandparents, fiction, Epistolary fiction, Clergy, fiction, Conflict of generations, Fiction, christian, general, Reminiscing in old age, Abolitionists

Description: **WINNER OF THE 2005 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION** In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames’s life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came 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, losing his right eye in battle. Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father—an ardent pacifist—and his grandfather, whose pistol and bloody shirts, concealed in an army blanket, may be relics from the fight between the abolitionists and those settlers who wanted to vote Kansas into the union as a slave state. And he tells a story of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, which are tested in his tender and strained relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friend’s wayward son. Gilead is the long-hoped-for second novel by one of our finest writers, a hymn of praise and lamentation to the God-haunted existence that Reverend Ames loves passionately, and from which he will soon part.