Gilead (Oprah's Book Club) A Novel

Toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life in 1956, the seventy-seven-year-old Iowa preacher begins a long, confessional letter to his young son, chronicling his life and his forebears, whose story stretches back to the Civil War. Ames writes of the tension between his grandfather, a passionate abolitionist who 'preached men into the Civil War,' and his father, an ardent pacifist. This letter is a meditation on faith, the beauty of existence, and the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, which are tested in his strained but tender relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friend’s wayward son. The novel is a hymn of praise and lamentation to the 'God-haunted existence' that Reverend Ames loves passionately, and from which he will soon part.

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