One of the most celebrated novelists of our time, Marilynne Robinson writes in the tradition of Whitman, Thoreau, and Dickinson using language as precise as it is radiant to describe characters and landscapes of the nineteenth century America. Twenty-four years after completing her first novel, Housekeeping, Robinson returned to fiction with Gilead. An intimate story of fathers and sons, spirituality, history, and the everyday, Gilead received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 2004. A skilled and celebrated essayist, Robinson is also the author of Mother Country and The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought. In her newest novel, Lila, Robinson returns to the town of Gilead, revisiting some of the beloved characters from her previous novel to tell the story of girlhood lived on the fringes of society.