The runaway bestseller of 2004 and Finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Award for Fiction

"At a moment in cultural history dominated by the shallow, the superficial, the quick fix, Marilynne Robinson is a miraculous anomaly: a writer who thoughtfully, carefully and tenaciously explores some of the deepest questions confronting the human species....Poignant, absorbing, lyrical...Robinson manages to convey the miracle of existence itself."--Merle Rubin, Los Angeles Times Book Review

Twenty-four years after her first novel, Housekeeping, Marilyn Robinson returns with an intimate tale of three generations from the Civil War to the 20th century: a story about fathers and sons and the spiritual battles that still rage at America's heart. Writing in the tradition of Dickinson and Whitman, Marilynne Robinson's beautiful, spare, and spiritual prose allows "even the faithless reader to feel the possibility of transcendent order." (Slate) In the luminous and unforgettable voice of Congregationalist minister John Ames, Gilead, reveals the human condition and the often unbearable beauty of an ordinary life.