Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Fiction: Christianity. Unabridged Audiobook from Audio Renissance. Published in 2005. 8 hours and 59 minutes. Read by Tim Jerome. Purchased from Audible.com.

Recommended by Mike Cope, this is a fictional letter from an aged dying father to his young son. I was copying down some passages from this book after church a couple of days ago. A friend came up and asked me what I was doing. When I explained what the book was about she just wrinkled up her nose at me. She didn't like thinking about a child growing up without his father. It's a shame she could not get past that, because this book is a fantastic look at some things that are just essential to think about. Plus there is a good story with a great moral woven in under the important things that John Ames wants to pass on to his son.

Publisher's summary:
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. 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 50, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle. 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. And he tells a story of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, which are tested in his tender and strained relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friend's wayward son.

This is also the tale of another remarkable vision, not a corporeal vision of God but the vision of life as a wondrously strange creation. It tells how wisdom was forged in Ames's soul during his solitary life, and how history lives through generations, pervasively present even when betrayed and forgotten.

Gilead is the long-hoped-for second novel by one of our finest writers, a hymn of praise and lamentation to the God-haunted existence that Reverend Ames loves passionately, and from which he will soon part.

Online book shopping:
Powell's: Gilead
amazon.co.uk: Gilead
amazon.com: Gilead : A Novel
Audible.com: Gilead