Gilead

Marilynne Robinson
This is a slow and lovely book, very moving and powerful and deceptively quiet and imagistic, the way Housekeeping was, even though on the surface it is very unlike her first novel. It has a core of religion, faith and philosophy, self-doubt and beauty – and it was brilliant in the way it uncovered the main character both in his strength and weakness unexpectedly and subtly, around the outside edges of the narrator’s own self reflection.

I was worried at the way it would end, spent the book waiting for the inescapable ending with a sad kind of heaviness – you know from the first pages that this is a narrative written by a dying and terribly aged man, and that inevitability infuses the whole story. And the ending made me cry. That has not happened to me in a long time.