"The fact is, I don't want to be old. And I certainly don't want to be dead. I don't want to be the tremulous coot you barely remember." John Ames, an elderly pastor in the small, secluded town of Gilead, Iowa, is facing imminent death due to a heart condition. He writes letters to his six-year old boy, only to be read when he is an adult.

Alongside stories of the past about his own father and grandfather, he charts his difficult relationship with Jack Boughton in the present – a man who adds an element of mystery to this spiritual novel. John wants to pass on the faith that has filled his life with meaning, and the forgiveness that has been a challenge to several generations in his family.

“The great danger of the clergyman in fiction,” says James Wood in his review, “is that his doctrinal belief will leak into the root system of the novel and turn argument into piety, drama into sermon. Robinson's pastor is a truly good and virtuous man, and occasionally you may wish he possessed a bit more malice, avarice or lust – or just an intriguing unreliability. But while John Ames may be a good man, he is not an uninteresting one, and he has a real tale to tell.”

Often compared with the writings of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, Marilynne Robinson's Gilead allows "even the faithless reader to feel the possibility of transcendent order". She makes excellent use of the form — the epistolary novel — which is classic but also one of the most difficult to pull off. It won her the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Published in 2004.