Books like Gilead
An ageing Iowa pastor writes a letter to his young son, reflecting on faith, regret, and the luminous strangeness of ordinary life.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Gilead
Housekeeping
Ruth and her younger sister Lucille, orphaned beside a glacial lake in Fingerbone, Idaho, are raised by their aunt Sylvie, a drifter who keeps house in her own strange way, and as Lucille chooses an ordinary life, Ruth drifts towards Sylvie's.
Out Stealing Horses
A sixty-seven-year-old widower moves to a remote cabin in eastern Norway and meets a neighbour who pulls him back to the summer of 1948, when he lost his best friend and his father.
The Dearly Beloved
In 1963 two young ministers, Charles and James, are called to share the pulpit of the Third Presbyterian Church in Greenwich Village, and their wives, Lily, who has no faith, and Nan, a minister's daughter, have to find a way to live alongside each other.
Bewilderment
A grieving father uses a neuroscience experiment to connect his son's mind to the natural world, and the boundary between human consciousness and nature dissolves.
A Death in the Family
In Knoxville in 1915 a young family's ordinary evening ends with a late phone call about the father, and the novel follows a six-year-old boy and the adults around him through the days that follow.
Cry, the Beloved Country
Stephen Kumalo, an elderly Zulu priest in the hills of Natal, travels to Johannesburg to look for his sister, who has stopped writing, and his son Absalom, who went to the city and never came back.
Go Tell It on the Mountain
On his fourteenth birthday in 1930s Harlem, John Grimes struggles with his stern preacher father, the church and his own desires, while the prayers of his family reveal the histories that shaped them.
Foster
A girl from a large, struggling family is sent to live with relatives on a farm in rural Ireland for a summer, and the quiet kindness she finds there changes her, in a single, devastating novella.
John of John
In the late 1990s, John-Calum, a twenty-two-year-old art school graduate, comes home to the family croft on the Isle of Harris when his father, a weaver and a deacon in a strict Presbyterian church, summons him with news that his grandmother is dying, though she seems in no hurry to go.
Fire Sermon
A long-married woman embarks on a spiritual and sexual correspondence with a poet, pulling her faith and marriage towards the edge.
Stoner
A Missouri farm boy becomes a literature professor at the University of Missouri and lives a quiet, thwarted life that only gains shape in its retelling.
The Centaur
Over three winter days in 1947, George Caldwell, a schoolteacher in small-town Pennsylvania, and his fifteen-year-old son Peter are stranded by snow, and their lives are shadowed by the myth of Chiron the centaur.