Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father-an 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. Ames is the son of an Iowan 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.

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.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award, GILEAD is a hymn of praise and lamentation to the God-haunted existence that Reverend Ames loves passionately, and from which he will soon part. 'Quietly powerful moving.' O, The Oprah Magazine (recommended reading)

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER.

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION.

I recooment the book and this production, with the slight reservation that the listener should understand the limited perspective of the narrator, and that for me, at leat, it took some time to fully engage with the story. I warmed to the character and his story, as well as the narrator, and found myself increasiingly respecting his Christian and humanistic view of the world and the people around him, as well as his experiences, recollections and doubts. After a while, it becomes clear that the single perpective is actually a central point of the story, which is in fact built upon in subsequent books, written from different characters' perspectives. there was a level at which I was skeptical that a father was write such things to his son, and from another perpective, the monologue restricted the panorama of characters.

It took a long time for me to engage with the character of the narrator. This is effectively a letter from an elderly preacher to his young son, telling the story of his history and relationships. I chose Gilead after reading many postive reviews and noting that it won the Pulitzer prize for fiction.

Gilead fiction