Marilynne Robinson’s ‘Lila’ completes a trilogy “unlike anything else in American literature”

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Marilynne Robinson’s Lila is one of three “exquisite books [that] constitute a trilogy on spiritual redemption unlike anything else in American literature.” (Ron Charles, The Washington Post, 9/30/14).

Lila is a companion book to Gilead (which won a Pulitzer and a National Book Critics Circle award) and Home (which won the Orange Prize). Now comes word that Lila, a finalist for the National Book Award, has won the National Book Critics Circle Award as well.

Set in the fictional town of Gilead, Iowa, the three books tell the intertwined stories of the Ames and Boughton families. In Gilead, the Rev. John Ames, one of a long line of preachers and still living in his grandfather’s house, is dying and urgently trying to finish a letter to his