GILEAD
By Marilynne Robinson
Picador. 247 pages
ISBN 0 312 42440 X
I promise that this will be the last American novel I review for a while, as the column has become rather US-dominated recently. But Gilead is worth our staying across the Atlantic for another month!
Gilead is formed of a long epistle, written as a journal over several weeks from an ageing pastor, conscious of his approaching death, to his young son. The setting is 1950s Iowa, in a town called Gilead, which is only ‘a dogged little outpost in the sandhills’. The events described cover a century’s worth of history, from the Civil War, through the Great Depression, and into the 1950s life of TV and cinema.
Misogyny, rights & Rowling
It might have seemed as if the isolation of lockdown was making people mad last month when the stars of …