Lila, homeless and alone after years of roaming the countryside, steps inside a small-town Iowa church-the only available shelter from the rain-and ignites a romance and a debate that will reshape her life. She becomes the wife of a minister and widower, John Ames, and begins a new existence while trying to make sense of the days of suffering that preceded her newfound security. Neglected as a toddler, Lila was rescued by Doll, a canny young drifter, and brought up by her in a hardscrabble childhood of itinerant work. Together they crafted a life on the run, living hand-to-mouth with nothing but their sisterly bond and a lucky knife to protect them. But despite bouts of petty violence and moments of desperation, their shared life is laced with moments of joy and love. When Lila arrives in Gilead, she struggles to harmonize the life of her makeshift family and their days of hardship with the gentle worldview of her husband which paradoxically judges those she loves. Revisiting the beloved characters and setting of Marilynne Robinson's Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead and Orange Prize-winning Home, Lila is a moving expression of the mysteries of existence.
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Profound explorations of faith, family, and spiritual transcendence in small-town American life define the fictional universe of the Gilead series, starting with the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gilead. American novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson has built a celebrated body of work through quiet, deeply meditative prose that examines moral accountability, memory, and grace in everyday human existence.
Born Marilynne Summers on November 26, 1943, in Sandpoint, Idaho, she earned a Bachelor of Arts from Brown University and a PhD from the University of Washington. She published her debut novel, Housekeeping, in 1980, winning the PEN/Hemingway Award and earning a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize. Robinson began teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1991, where she mentored generations of writers before her retirement in the spring of 2016. Across her writing career, she has received numerous honours, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005, the National Humanities Medal in 2012, and the 2016 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. In 2016, Robinson was also named in Time magazine's list of 100 most influential people.
Robinson's fiction and non-fiction feature luminous, plain-spoken language that balances rigorous intellectual thought with emotional resonance. Deeply informed by Calvinist theology and mainline Protestant traditions, her work uses religion as a framing mechanism to explore moral orientation, community, and human dignity. Her non-fiction works, including Mother Country (1989), The Death of Adam (1998), Absence of Mind (2010), When I Was a Child I Read Books (2012), and The Givenness of Things (2015), critique modern social thought and examine spiritual inwardness with clarity and ethical commitment.
Gilead
