Lila (Oprah's Book Club)

“In her new novel, Lila, Marilynne Robinson has written a deeply romantic love story embodied in the language and ideas of Calvinist doctrine. She really is not like any other writer. She really isn't . . . Robinson has created a small, rich and fearless body of work in which religion exists unashamedly, as does doubt, unashamedly.”—Cathleen Schine, The New York Review of Books

“Radiant . . . As in Gilead and Home, Robinson steps away from the conventions of the realistic novel to deal with metaphysical abstractions, signaling by the formality of her language her adoption of another convention, by which characters inhabiting an almost Norman Rockwell-ish world . . . live and think on a spiritual plane . . . [Lila is] a mediation on morality and psychology, compelling in its frankness about its truly shocking subject: the damage to the human personality done by poverty, neglect and abandonment.”—Diane Johnson, The New York Times Book Review

“Writing in lovely, angular prose that has the high loneliness of an old bluegrass tune, Ms. Robinson has created a balladlike story . . . The novel is powerful and deeply affecting . . . Ms. Robinson renders [Lila's] tale with the stark poetry of Edward Hopper or Andrew Wyeth.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“Ever since the publication of Robinson's thrilling first novel, Housekeeping, reviewers have been pointing out that, for an analyst of modern alienation, she is an unusual specimen: a devout Protestant, reared in Idaho. She now lives in Iowa City, where she teaches at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and where, for years, she has been accustomed to interrupting her career as a novelist to produce essays on such matters as the truth of John Calvin's writings. But Robinson's Low Church allegiance has hugely benefited her fiction . . . This is an unflinching book.”—Joan Acocella, The New Yorker

"Marilynne Robinson tracks the movements of grace as if it were a wild animal, appearing for fleeting intervals and then disappearing past the range of vision, emerging again where we least expect to find it. Her novels are interested in what makes grace necessary at all—shame and its afterlife, loss and its residue, the limits and betrayals of intimacy. In Lila, her brilliant and deeply affecting new novel, even her description of sunlight in a St. Louis bordello holds a kind of heartbreak . . . Robinson's determination to shed light on . . . complexities—the solitude that endures inside intimacy, the sorrow that persists beside joy—marks her as one of those rare writers genuinely committed to contradiction as an abiding state of consciousness. Her characters surprise us with the depth and ceaseless wrinkling of their feelings."—Leslie Jamison, The Atlantic

“Lila is a book whose grandeur is found in its humility. That's what makes Gilead among the most memorable settings in American fiction . . . Gilead [is] a kind of mythic everyplace, a quintessential national setting where our country's complicated union with faith, in all its degrees of constancy and skepticism, is enacted.”—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

“Gorgeous writing, an absolutely beautiful book . . . This should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Robinson, a novelist who can make the most quotidian moments epic because of her ability to peel back the surfaces of ordinary lives . . . [a] profound and deeply rendered novel.”—David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times

“My message is simple. Even if you haven't found the two previous books to your taste, give Lila a try . . . what we get . . . is the highest fictional magic: a character who seems so real, it's hard to remember that she exists only in the page of this book . . . No writers can see life whole. There's too much of it, too many sides, to be comprehended by a single vision. But some books give us a sense of such wholeness, and they are precious for it. Lila is such a book.”—John Wilson, Chicago Tribune

“Lila, Marilynne Robinson's remarkable new novel, stands alone as a book to read and even read again. It's both a multilayered love story and a perceptive look at how early deprivation causes lasting damage . . . Robinson is a novelist of the first order.”—Ellen Heltzel, The Seattle Times

“Written in beautiful, precise language, [Lila] glows like a banked fire that provides steady illumination. Lila should prompt first-time Robinson readers to track down her other works.”—Martha Woodall, Philadelphia Inquirer

“Set aside the idea that Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson's groundbreaking 1980 debut novel, should be on anyone's short list for the Great American Novel . . . It's just as well to open Lila with no preconceptions and just star reading. The pages in this volume are dense, but once you release yourself to Robinson's rhythms, the rewards are profound and layered, and what was intimidating becomes magnetic . . . Robinson has created a work in Lila that's both old-fashioned and contemporary. Timeless.”—The Denver Post

“The protagonist of the stunning Lila is as lost a character as can be found in literature . . . Don't hesitate to read Lila . . . It's a novel that stands on its own and is surely one of the best of the year.”—Holly Silva, St Louis Post-Dispatch

“Existence and 'all the great storms that rise in it' are at the heart of Marilynne Robinson's glorious new novel, Lila . . . Lila is—at once—powerful, profound, and positively radiant in its depiction of its namesake, a child reared by drifters who finds a kindred soul in 'a big, silvery old man,' the Rev. John Ames . . . Life, death, joy, fear, doubt, love, violence, kindness—all of this, and more, dwells in Lila, a book, I will venture, already for the ages, its protagonist engraved upon our souls.”—Karen Brady, The Buffalo News

“Lila is a dark, powerful, uplifting, unforgettable novel. And Robinson's Gilead trilogy—Gilead, Home, and Lila—is a great achievement in American fiction.”—Bryan Wooley, Dallas Morning News

“Marilynne Robinson is one of the great religious novelists, not only of our age, but any age . . . Not even gorgeous is a strong enough word for what grandeur charges the pages of Lila.”—Casey Cep, New Republic

“Literary lioness Robinson—she's won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, a Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, and a National Book Critics Circle Award, among other laurels—continues the soaring run of novels with loosely connected story lines and deep religious currents that she launched a decade ago, almost a quarter century after her acclaimed fiction debut, Housekeeping . . . Lila's journey—its darker passages illuminated by Robinson's ability to write about love and the natural world with grit and graceful reverence—will mesmerize both longtime Robinson devotees and those coming to her work for the first time.”—Elle

“Robinson's genius is for making indistinguishable the highest ends of faith and fiction . . . The beauty of Robinson's prose suggests an author continually threading with spun platinum the world's finest needle.”—Michelle Orange, Bookforum

“Robinson has created a tour de force, an unforgettably dynamic odyssey, a passionate and learned moral and spiritual inquiry, a paean to the earth, and a witty and transcendent love story—all within a refulgent and resounding novel so beautifully precise and cadenced it wholly transfixes and transforms us.”—Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

“This third of three novels set in the fictional plains town of Gilead, Iowa, is a masterpiece of prose in the service of the moral seriousness that distinguishes Robinson's work . . . Lila is a superb creation. Largely uneducated, almost feral, Lila has a thirst for stability and knowledge. As she yearns to forget the terrible memories and shame of her past, Lila is hesitant to reveal them to her loving new husband. The courtship of the couple—John Ames: tentative, shy, and awkward; Lila: naïve, suspicious, wary, full of dread—will endure as a classic set piece of character revelation, during which two achingly lonely people discover the comfort of marital love . . . Robinson carefully crafts this provocative and deeply meaningful spiritual search for the meaning of existence. What brings the couple together is a joyous appreciation of the beauty of the natural world and the possibility of grace.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)