Home ‘Her novels are replete with a sense of felt life, with a deep and abiding sympathy for her characters and a full understanding of their inner lives.’ Colm TóibínĪ companion to Gilead, not sequel but sibling, Home takes place in the same period and same Iowa town. It is in this novel that we also first encounter Jack Boughton, the prodigal son of Ames’s best friend, returning home in circumstances that Ames views with suspicion. In 1956, towards the end of John Ames’s life, he begins a letter to his 7-year-old son. Set in Iowa, where Robinson has lived for more than twenty years, Gilead intimately tells the story of the last days of Reverend John Ames. Gilead ‘Gilead is a serene, almost meditative book, and Robinson writes with an unnameable, enviable quality that forces you to read slowly, with intention.’ Guardian In anticipation of Jack, we’re revisiting each of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead novels, so read on for where to start.

Her devoted readers have long been hoping that she would return to her Gilead novels and their hopes will be rewarded this autumn with Jack, the final novel in the quartet.

Her novels have been described by the Paris Review as “celebrations of the human” and it’s with undeniable grace and compassion that Marilynne Robinson writes her characters into being. Marilynne Robinson is widely considered to be one of America’s greatest writers and thinkers, counting among her accolodes the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Hemingway Pen award.

Marilynne robinson gilead series