One of the most prominent novelists of her generation came to the John Adams Institute to talk about her new novel Lila, the third and final part of her Gilead trilogy. Readers all over the world had anxiously been awaiting it, among them President Obama who identifies her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gilead as one of his favorite contemporary books. With Lila, the reader returns to the small-town, church-centered world of the preacher John Ames. But this time his young wife Lila, who was in the background in the first two novels, takes pride of place. Robinson succeeds in revealing the mind of an uneducated woman struggling to comprehend why things happen and what our lives mean. Lila was a National Book Award finalist and is “both believable and achingly beautiful,” according to The Huffington Post.
