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In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowa preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He "preached men into the Civil War," then, at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle.

Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father -and ardent pacifist - and his grandfather, whose pistol and bloody shirts, concealed in an army blanket, may be relics from the fight between the abolitionists and those settlers who wanted to vote Kansas into the Union as a slave state.

And he tells a story of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, which are tested in his tender and strained relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friend's way-ward son.

Gilead is the long-hoped-for second novel by Marilynne Robinson, a hymn of praise and lamentation to the God-haunted existence that Reverend Ames loves passionately, and from which he will soon part.

Marilynne Robinson is the author of the modern classic Housekeeping - winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award - and two books of non-fiction, Mother Country and The Death of Adam. Gilead won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Marilynne teaches at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.