![]() ![]() After the years spent in the wilderness of his own company, Ames can find only rapture in his wife and his son playing in the sprinkler: "whooping and stomping as sane people ought to do when they encounter a thing so miraculous as water. ![]() ![]() Gilead is an epistolary novel, as the entire narrative is a single, continuing, albeit episodic, document, written on several. It is Robinson's second novel, following Housekeeping (1980). It won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Having lost his first wife and child to a difficult labour 50 years earlier, he has unexpectedly started a new family. Gilead is a novel written by Marilynne Robinson published in 2004. The pastor is living out the miracle of his late life. He has come to see his perishability, and the world looks lovely in the light of his leaving it. Water, the house cat, baseball on the radio: these are achingly more beautiful as they will soon be lost. ![]() Ames, a pastor in the crumbling prairie town of Gilead, Iowa, finds a beauty in creation that almost breaks his heart – a heart now prone to missed beats, flutters, uneven squeezes of the chambers. I don't want to be the tremulous coot you barely remember." As John Ames begins to write a letter to his son, a letter that will be read when he is long buried, he is unaware that this will not be a meditation on beauty, but on the difficulty of forgiveness. ![]()
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