Lila
by Robinson, Marilynne
- Used
- near fine
- Hardcover
- Signed
- first
- Condition
- Near Fine/Fine
- ISBN 10
- 1443413704
- ISBN 13
- 9781443413701
- Seller
-
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Payment Methods Accepted
About This Item
First printing of the First Canadian edition. Inscribed and signed by Marilynne Robinson on title page. Third volume in the Gilead trilogy. Winner of the 2014 National Book Critics Circle award. 261 pages. Fine but for very light tanning to edges of text block.
Reviews
“She saw him standing in the parlor with his beautiful old head bowed down on his beautiful old chest……….Praying looks just like grief. Like shame. Like regret”
Lila is the fourth novel by prize-winning American author, Marilynne Robinson, and the third book in the Gilead series. Readers of the first book will recall that seventy-six year old Reverend John Ames was married to Lila, a woman thirty-five years his junior who had borne him a son seven years before. Just how that somewhat intriguing situation came to be: how an old man came to marry a much younger woman, a woman with a very different background to that of his first wife; is what Robinson relates in this third book.
As her life with John Ames and her pregnancy progresses, Lila, a seemingly prickly character, thinks back on her life, the events of which are gradually revealed. It has been a life filled with hardship, loneliness and loss (“Don’t want what you don’t need and you’ll be fine. Don’t want what you can’t have”) and Lila finds it difficult to trust her new-found security with John Ames, constantly reassuring herself that she can leave at any time and go back to what she had before, although she is loathe to hurt him (“Maybe I can teach him a new kind of sadness. Maybe he really does care whether I stay or go”). It seems an unlikely match but as Lila reads the Bible and challenges John with all sorts of difficult questions about life, it becomes apparent that both parties benefit from the union. She muses “What would I pray for, if I thought there was any point to it? Well, I guess the first thing would have to be that there was some kind of point to it” and eventually finds that his care “was nothing she had known to hope for and something she had wanted too much all the same. So too much happiness came with it, and happiness was strange to her.”
This is a novel with some beautiful descriptive prose (“She had never really thought about the way the dead would gather at the edge of town, all their names spelled out so you’d know whose they were for as long as that family lived in that place” and “….the fields looking so green in the evening light…Every farmhouse in its cloud of trees. There is a way trees stir before rain, as if they already felt the heaviness”), as well as many words of wisdom (“Any good thing is less good the more any human lays claim to it” and “Thinking about hell doesn’t help me live the way I should”).
This moving and thought-provoking novel, National Book Award Nominee for Fiction 2014, is a heart-warming read.
With thanks to TheReadingRoom and the publisher for this copy to read and review.
(Log in or Create an Account first!)
Details
- Bookseller
- Ted Brown (CA)
- Bookseller's Inventory #
- 359219
- Title
- Lila
- Author
- Robinson, Marilynne
- Book Condition
- Used - Near Fine
- Jacket Condition
- Fine
- Quantity Available
- 1
- Binding
- Hardcover
- ISBN 10
- 1443413704
- ISBN 13
- 9781443413701
- Publisher
- HarperCollins
- Place of Publication
- Toronto
- Date Published
- 2014
- Bookseller catalogs
- MODERN FIRST EDITIONS;
Terms of Sale
Ted Brown
Payment by personal cheque, International Money Order or bank draft, in U.S. or Canadian funds. We also accept payments through PayPal, and credit card payments through Biblio.com. No U.S. Postal Money Orders, please, as they are not negotiable in Canada. Orders are shipped promptly. Please note that we mail at cost. As the postal charges are established by the weight of hardcover books, postage will be reduced for smaller paperbacks at the time of ordering. Requests for holds will be honoured for up to 14 days maximum. Returns accepted within 30 days if book is not as described.
About the Seller
Ted Brown
About Ted Brown
Glossary
Some terminology that may be used in this description includes:
- Fine
- A book in fine condition exhibits no flaws. A fine condition book closely approaches As New condition, but may lack the...
- Inscribed
- When a book is described as being inscribed, it indicates that a short note written by the author or a previous owner has been...
- Title Page
- A page at the front of a book which may contain the title of the book, any subtitles, the authors, contributors, editors, the...
- Text Block
- Most simply the inside pages of a book. More precisely, the block of paper formed by the cut and stacked pages of a book....
- Edges
- The collective of the top, fore and bottom edges of the text block of the book, being that part of the edges of the pages of a...