Gilead

Gilead is a novel by the American writer Marilynne Robinson, published in 2004. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005 and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and it was her second novel after Housekeeping.

The book is written as a single document, made up of a series of sittings in which John Ames writes to his son. He was born in 1880, the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who came to Kansas and Iowa with strong convictions about the slavery question, and the differences between those generations are part of what he wants to explain. His own life has been quiet: a small town congregation, a first marriage he lost early and could not speak about for years, and a late second marriage that gave him the son he is writing for. Ames sets down the theology he believes, the history of his family and town, and a long argument with a friend's son whose return to Gilead unsettles him.

Robinson writes in the voice of a minister thinking carefully about what he says, and the novel is concerned with ordinary life seen at the end of it, from a position where the details of a small town are as important as anything larger.