Press Reviews

• Peter Hitchens

  Mail Online

  Her poetic, almost biblical style of writing... flows like clear cold water and is full of quiet power while remaining oddly conversational... People say they love these books, and I can see why. Quite how they can do so without discerning within them a serious, deep, patient but modest defence of the Christian proposition, I do not know

• Sunday Times

  Gilead is no less a masterpiece than Housekeeping

• Daily Telegraph

  Stunning... there are gems on every page of Gilead, but it is the whole construction that marks it as a great work

• Independent

  The slow pulse of Robinson's writing slows the reader's eye and mind, and creates in the reading process a literary version of the narrator's spiritual experience. Gilead reminds us that words have power to spare, to forgive, to do justice

• Kirkus Reviews

  A novel as big as a nation, as quiet as thought, and moving as prayer. Matchless and towering

• Sarah Waters

  A beautiful novel: wise, tender and perfectly measured

• Robert McCrum

  Observer

  A visionary work of dazzling originality

• Jane Shilling

  Sunday Telegraph

  Writing of this quality, with an authority as unforced as the perfect pitch in music, is rare and carries with it a sense almost of danger

• Neel Mukherjee

  The Times

  It is a book of such meditative calm, such spiritual intensity that it seems miraculous that her silence was only for 23 years; such measure of wisdom is the fruit of a lifetime. Robinson's prose, aligned with the sublime simplicity of the language of the bible, is nothing short of a benediction. You might not share its faith, but it is difficult not to be awed, moved and ultimately humbled by the spiritual effulgence that lights up the novel from within

• Sarah Churchill

  Times Literary Supplement

  "Grace is not so poor a thing that it cannot present itself in any number of ways", Ames tells of his son; the same can be said of this book, one of the best American novels in recent memory, so replete with grace that almost anyone should find a balm in Gilead

• Michael Arditti

  Daily Mail

  Gilead is Marilynne Robinson's first novel since her highly acclaimed debut, Housekeeping, 24 years ago, and its measured prose manifests a spiritual power that well rewards the wait

• Washington Post

  So serenely beautiful and written in a prose so gravely measured and thoughtful, that one feels touched with grace just to read it

• Elle

  Rapturous... astonishing... Gilead is an inspired work from a writer whose sensibility seems steeped in holy fire

• Los Angeles Times

  Poignant, absorbing, lyrical... Robinson manages to convey the miracle of existence itself

• San Francisco Chronicle

  Gilead is a refuge for readers longing for that increasingly rare work of fiction, one that explores big ideas while telling a good story