Marilynne Robinson · 2004 · exile

Marilynne Robinson's Pulitzer winner, written as a letter from a dying Iowa preacher of seventy-six to a son of seven. Almost nothing happens and almost nobody goes anywhere - except once, in 1892, when a boy of twelve walked to Kansas with his father in a drought to find his grandfather's grave.

1. 1
   Maine

   Ames's grandfather comes west out of Maine because he has had a vision of Christ in chains - and goes to Kansas to fight for abolition, loses an eye doing it, and preaches afterwards with a pistol in his belt.

2. 2
   Gilead

   A small Iowa town Robinson invented, where three generations of Ames men have had the same pulpit - and where a preacher of seventy-six with a failing heart is writing everything down for a son of seven who will read it grown.

3. 3
   Kansas

   1892, and Ames aged twelve walks to Kansas with his father in a drought year to find the grandfather's grave - the two of them starving, the country burnt brown, and a boy watching his father pray over a headstone in a lost town.

4. 4
   Gilead

   Home, and the long quiet of the book: fifty years of sermons, a first wife and daughter dead young, and then at sixty-seven a woman walking into his church out of the rain who becomes his wife.

5. 5
   St Louis

   Where Jack Boughton has been, and the reason he cannot say what he has been doing - a wife he is not allowed to have and a child, which is the thing Ames has to be told before he can forgive him for anything.

6. 6
   Gilead

   The last pages, a blessing given to the man he has spent the book resenting - and an old preacher telling his son he will pray that he grows up a brave man in a brave country, and then lying down to sleep.