In the sheer beauty of its prose and the fierceness of itspassion, Gilead is a work of startling power: a seemingly simple artifice that reveals more complex and finer structures the closer we approach it. It is a subtle, gorgeously wrought,and immensely moving novel.

Twenty-four years after the publication of her first novel, Housekeeping,Marilynne Robinson returns with an intimate tale of three generations,from the Civil War to the twentieth century: a story about fathers and sons and the spiritual battles that still rage at America's heart. Written in the tradition of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, Robinson's beautiful, spare, and spiritual prose allows "even the faithless reader to feel the possibility of transcendent order" (Slate). Gilead, told in the luminous and unforgettable voice of Congregationalist minister John Ames, reveals the human condition and "manages to convey the miracle of existence itself.