%1

In 1980, Marilynne Robinson published her first novel, Housekeeping, which won a PEN/Hemingway Award and was made into a movie. She published nonfiction works during the next 24 years, including The Death of Adam and Mother Country, but kept her fans waiting until 2004 for a second novel. Gilead is the memoir of John Ames, a Congregationalist pastor in a small Iowa town who reminisces about his father, a preacher with pacifist convictions, and his grandfather, an abolitionist minister.