Lila (Oprah's Book Club): A Novel by Marilynne Robinson
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Lila (Oprah's Book Club): A Novel

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7,365 ratings


Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award

National Book Award Finalist

A new American classic from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gilead and Housekeeping

Marilynne Robinson, one of the greatest novelists of our time, returns to the town of Gilead in an unforgettable story of a girlhood lived on the fringes of society in fear, awe, and wonder.

Lila, homeless and alone after years of roaming the countryside, steps inside a small-town Iowa church-the only available shelter from the rain-and ignites a romance and a debate that will reshape her life. She becomes the wife of a minister, John Ames, and begins a new existence while trying to make sense of the life that preceded her newfound security.

Neglected as a toddler, Lila was rescued by Doll, a canny young drifter, and brought up by her in a hardscrabble childhood. Together they crafted a life on the run, living hand to mouth with nothing but their sisterly bond and a ragged blade to protect them. Despite bouts of petty violence and moments of desperation, their shared life was laced with moments of joy and love. When Lila arrives in Gilead, she struggles to reconcile the life of her makeshift family and their days of hardship with the gentle Christian worldview of her husband which paradoxically judges those she loves.

Revisiting the beloved characters and setting of Robinson's Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead and Home, a National Book Award finalist, Lila is a moving expression of the mysteries of existence that is destined to become an American classic.

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ISBN-10

1250784034

ISBN-13

978-1250784032

Print length

272 pages

Language

English

Publisher

Picador Paper

Publication date

August 03, 2020

Dimensions

5.47 x 0.72 x 8.31 inches

Item weight

8.2 ounces



Popular Highlights in this book

  • When you’re scalded, touch hurts, it makes no difference if it’s kindly meant.

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  • Any good thing is less good the more any human being lays claim to it.

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  • She meant to ask him sometime how praying is different from worrying.

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B00J6U7K62

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4299 KB

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Editorial Reviews

A masterpiece . . . Lila is a superb creation (Publishers Weekly)

One of the greatest living novelists . . . [Lila is] just as wise, moving and genuine as its predecessors (Harper's Bazaar)

Robinson brings [the story] to pulsating life in prose of great and luminous beauty . . . a book that leaves the reader feeling what can only be called exaltation (Neel Mukherjee Independent)

This superb novel can only add to [Robinson's] already stratospherically high reputation (Daily Mail)

Lila is a really beautiful book: beautiful prose, beautiful story; morally beautiful too. After reading it the world seems more dazzling, fuller of wonder and mystery than it did before, as if you were newly in love. I wish I could persuade everyone who ever buys a book to read this one (Cressida Connolly Spectator)

Deeply moving, almost transformative . . . frank and direct, but occasionally moved to ecstasy by the spirit (Sunday Times)

Tinged with heartbreaking beauty (Scotsman)

Although Lila revisits the characters of Robinson's previous books, Gilead, a Pulitzer prizewinner, and Home, a finalist in the American National Book Awards, and brings a certain completeness to their journeys, the book stands well on its own as a powerful search for the meaning of life as well as a touching and unlikely story of love and, ultimately, hope (The Times)

Robinson is a glorious writer . . . This novel, different in tone from its predecessors, stands beautifully alongside them (Claire Messud Financial Times)

There is no one quite like this American writer, or quite as good as her . . . extraordinarily fluent and pitch perfect prose (Tablet)

Measured and lyrical; the sound of this book is akin at times to the Cormac McCarthy of The Road . . . Robinson writes brilliantly about the way people dance warily around each other, never quite coinciding, stricken with longing and love (Literary Review)

This third novel in the sequence is, in many ways, the most adventurous of all . . . Lila is the work of an exceptional novelist at the peak of her capacity (Rowan Williams New Statesman)

Lila is a deeply affecting exploration of existence, love and the inevitability of loneliness. And although enriched by the two preceding books, it has the strength, beauty and originality to be read, enjoyed and appreciated as a standalone work. Written in beautiful, poetic prose, it's a remarkable achievement (List)

A sumptuous, graceful, and ultimately life-affirming novel (James Kidd Independent on Sunday)

Robinson has made a world so palpable and full that each book can stand alone...Taken together, these books will surely be known as one of the great achievements of contemporary literature (Observer)

Told with measured and absorbing elegance, this account of the growing love and trust between Lila and Reverend Ames is touching and convincing. (Scotland on Sunday)

Searching and full of grace (Daily Telegraph)

Robinson explores eternity, and she does so in a quiet, ruminative style that takes over your heart as well as your head. Once you've fallen under her spell, she's not just mesmerising but indispensable (Maggie Fergusson Intelligent Life (The Economist))

Robinson's writing can light up consciousness, and make even the most passing thoughts feel indelible. Her older sister in American literature is Emily Dickinson (Prospect)

Lila is a deeply affecting exploration of existence and love (List)

The Gilead novels provide insights into a people whose fates are bound to the land they live on. Iowa must be proud to have such a chronicler among them (Sarah Franklin Sunday Express)

As a reader you feel very well looked after by Marilynne Robinson: you are knocked out by the weight of thought, the care, the worry she puts into her work. You find yourself wandering into vast new rooms, as if you're in a fabulous museum you've dreamt up for your own pleasure. There's really no one else writing like this today . . . Lila is just so damnably beautiful (Herald)

Lila has a power beyond words (Stylist)

Mesmerising . . . reminiscent of the great Victorian novelists . . . Robinson's exquisitely wrought prose resonates (Mail on Sunday)

Her questioning books express wonder: they are enlightening, in the best sense, passionately contesting our facile, recycled understanding of ourselves and of our world (Sarah Churchwell Guardian)

Subtle shifts of loyalties, strange moral priorities make [Robinson's] books compellingly powerful (Joan Bakewell New Statesman)

The giant themes and big questions that sit beneath the surface of Lila's incredibly moving story are compelling (Amma Asante Observer)

My novel of the year can only be Lila by the inimitable Marilynne Robinson . . .my favourite living author and this once again demonstrates her remarkable gift for psychological depth (Salley Vickers Observer)

Exquisitely observed, an ultimately optimistic journey through the corrosive power of shame to divide and distort (Naomi Alderman Observer)

Lila by Marilynne Robinson is the heartbreaking conclusion to her Gilead trilogy (Robert McCrum Observer)

Lila was the book of books this year, an amazing achievement (Todd McEwen Sunday Herald)

One of the finest writers in America (The Economist)

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Sample

The child was just there on the stoop in the dark, hugging herself against the cold, all cried out and nearly sleeping. She couldn’t holler anymore and they didn’t hear her anyway, or they might and that would make things worse. Somebody had shouted, Shut that thing up or I’ll do it! and then a woman grabbed her out from under the table by her arm and pushed her out onto the stoop and shut the door and the cats went under the house. They wouldn’t let her near them anymore because she picked them up by their tails sometimes. Her arms were all over scratches, and the scratches stung. She had crawled under the house to find the cats, but even when she did catch one in her hands it struggled harder the harder she held on to it and it bit her, so she let it go. Why you keep pounding at the screen door? Nobody gonna want you around if you act like that. And then the door closed again, and after a while night came. The people inside fought themselves quiet, and it was night for a long time. She was afraid to be under the house, and afraid to be up on the stoop, but if she stayed by the door it might open. There was a moon staring straight at her, and there were sounds in the woods, but she was nearly sleeping when Doll came up the path and found her there like that, miserable as could be, and took her up in her arms and wrapped her into her shawl, and said, “Well, we got no place to go. Where we gonna go?”

If there was anyone in the world the child hated worst, it was Doll. She’d go scrubbing at her face with a wet rag, or she’d be after her hair with a busted comb, trying to get the snarls out. Doll slept at the house most nights, and maybe she paid for it by sweeping up a little. She was the only one who did any sweeping, and she’d be cussing while she did it, Don’t do one damn bit of good, and someone would say, Then leave it be, dammit. There’d be people sleeping right on the floor, in some old mess of quilts and gunnysacks. You wouldn’t know from one day to the next.

When the child stayed under the table they would forget her most of the time. The table was shoved into a corner and they wouldn’t go to the trouble of reaching under to pull her out of there if she kept quiet enough. When Doll came in at night she would kneel down and spread that shawl over her, but then she left again so early in the morning that the child would feel the shawl slip off and she’d feel colder for the lost warmth of it, and stir, and cuss a little. But there would be hardtack, an apple, something, and a cup of water left there for her when she woke up. Once, there was a kind of toy. It was just a horse chestnut with a bit of cloth over it, tied with a string, and two knots at the sides and two at the bottom, like hands and feet. The child whispered to it and slept with it under her shirt.

Lila would never tell anyone about that time. She knew it would sound very sad, and it wasn’t, really. Doll had taken her up in her arms and wrapped her shawl around her. “You just hush now,” she said. “Don’t go waking folks up.” She settled the child on her hip and carried her into the dark house, stepping as carefully and quietly as she could, and found the bundle she kept in her corner, and then they went out into the chilly dark again, down the steps. The house was rank with sleep and the night was windy, full of tree sounds. The moon was gone and there was rain, so fine then it was only a tingle on the skin. The child was four or five, long-legged, and Doll couldn’t keep her covered up, but she chafed at her calves with her big, rough hand and brushed the damp from her cheek and her hair. She whispered, “Don’t know what I think I’m doing. Never figured on it. Well, maybe I did. I don’t know. I guess I probly did. This sure ain’t the night for it.” She hitched up her apron to cover the child’s legs and carried her out past the clearing. The door might have opened, and a woman might have called after them, Where you going with that child? and then, after a minute, closed the door again, as if she had done all decency required. “Well,” Doll whispered, “we’ll just have to see.”

The road wasn’t really much more than a path, but Doll had walked it so often in the dark that she stepped over the roots and around the potholes and never paused or stumbled. She could walk quickly when there was no light at all. And she was strong enough that even an awkward burden like a leggy child could rest in her arms almost asleep. Lila knew it couldn’t have been the way she remembered it, as if she were carried along in the wind, and there were arms around her to let her know she was safe, and there was a whisper at her ear to let her know that she shouldn’t be lonely. The whisper said, “I got to find a place to put you down. I got to find a dry place.” And then they sat on the ground, on pine needles, Doll with her back against a tree and the child curled into her lap, against her breast, hearing the beat of her heart, feeling it. Rain fell heavily. Big drops spattered them sometimes. Doll said, “I should have knowed it was coming on rain. And now you got the fever.” But the child just lay against her, hoping to stay where she was, hoping the rain wouldn’t end. Doll may have been the loneliest woman in the world, and she was the loneliest child, and there they were, the two of them together, keeping each other warm in the rain.

When the rain ended, Doll got to her feet, awkwardly with the child in her arms, and tucked the shawl around her as well as she could. She said, “I know a place.” The child’s head would drop back, and Doll would heft her up again, trying to keep her covered. “We’re almost there.”

It was another cabin with a stoop, and a dooryard beaten bare. An old black dog got up on his forelegs, then his hind legs, and barked, and an old woman opened the door. She said, “No work for you here, Doll. Nothing to spare.”

Doll sat down on the stoop. “Just thought I’d rest a little.”

“What you got there? Where’d you get that child?”

“Never mind.”

“Well, you better put her back.”

“Maybe. Don’t think I will, though.”

“Better feed her something, at least.”

Doll said nothing.

The old woman went into the house and brought out a scrap of corn bread. She said, “I was about to do the milking. You might as well go inside, get her in out of the cold.”

Doll stood with her by the stove, where there was just the little warmth of the banked embers. She whispered, “You hush. I got something for you here. You got to eat it.” But the child couldn’t rouse herself, couldn’t keep her head from lolling back. So Doll knelt with her on the floor to free her hands, and pinched off little pills of corn bread and put them in the child’s mouth, one after another. “You got to swallow.”

The old woman came back with a pail of milk. “Warm from the cow,” she said. “Best thing for a child.” That strong, grassy smell, raw milk in a tin cup. Doll gave it to her in sips, holding her head in the crook of her arm.

“Well, she got something in her, if she keeps it down. Now I’ll put some wood on the fire and we can clean her up some.”

When the room was warmer and the water in the kettle was warm, the old woman held her standing in a white basin on the floor by the stove and Doll washed her down with a rag and a bit of soap, scrubbing a little where the cats had scratched her, and on the chigger bites and mosquito bites where she had scratched herself, and where there were slivers in her knees, and where she had a habit of biting her hand. The water in the basin got so dirty they threw it out the door and started over. Her whole body shivered with the cold and the sting. “Nits,” the old woman said. “We got to cut her hair.” She fetched a razor and began shearing off the tangles as close to the child’s scalp as she dared—“I got a blade here. She better hold still.” Then they soaped and scrubbed her head, and water and suds ran into her eyes, and she struggled and yelled with all the strength she had and told them both they could rot in hell. The old woman said, “You’ll want to talk to her about that.”

Doll touched the soap and tears off the child’s face with the hem of her apron. “Never had the heart to scold her. Them’s about the only words I ever heard her say.” They made her a couple of dresses out of flour sacks with holes cut in them for her head and arms. They were stiff at first and smelled of being saved in a chest or a cupboard, and they had little flowers all over them, like Doll’s apron.


It seemed like one long night, but it must have been a week, two weeks, rocking on Doll’s lap while the old woman fussed around them.

“You don’t have enough trouble, I guess. Carrying off a child that’s just going to die on you anyway.”

“Ain’t going to let her die.”

“Oh? When’s the last time you got to decide about something?”

“If I left her be where she was, she’da died for sure.”

“Well, maybe her folks won’t see it that way. They know you took her? What you going to say when they come looking for her? She’s buried in the woods somewhere? Out by the potato patch? I don’t have troubles enough of my own?”

Doll said, “Nobody going to come looking.”

“You probly right about that. That’s the spindliest damn child I ever saw.”

But the whole time she talked she’d be stirring a pot of grits and blackstrap molasses. Doll would give the child a spoonful or two, then rock her a little while, then give her another spoonful. She rocked her and fed her all night long, and dozed off with her cheek against the child’s hot forehead.

The old woman got up now and then to put more wood in the stove. “She keeping it down?”

“Mostly.”

“She taking any water?”

“Some.”

When the old woman went away again Doll would whisper to her, “Now, don’t you go dying on me. Put me to all this bother for nothing. Don’t you go dying.” And then, so the child could barely hear, “You going to die if you have to. I know. But I got you out of the rain, didn’t I? We’re warm here, ain’t we?”

After a while the old woman again. “Put her in my bed if you want. I guess I won’t be sleeping tonight, either.”

“I got to make sure she can breathe all right.”

“Let me set with her then.”

“She’s clinging on to me.”

“Well.” The old woman brought the quilt from her bed and spread it over them.

The child could hear Doll’s heart beating and she could feel the rise and fall of her breath. It was too warm and she felt herself struggling against the quilt and against Doll’s arms and clinging to her at the same time with her arms around her neck.

Copyright © 2014 by Marilynne Robinson

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About the authors

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson is the author of the bestselling novels "Lila," "Home" (winner of the Orange Prize), "Gilead" (winner of the Pulitzer Prize), and "Housekeeping" (winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award).

She has also written four books of nonfiction, "When I Was a Child I Read Books," "Absence of Mind," "Mother Country" and "The Death of Adam." She teaches at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

She has been given honorary degrees from Brown University, the University of the South, Holy Cross, Notre Dame, Amherst, Skidmore, and Oxford University. She was also elected a fellow of Mansfield College, Oxford University.

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Reviews

Customer reviews

4.1 out of 5

7,365 global ratings

C & L Taylor

C & L Taylor

5

Poetic, moving, haunting, gorgeous. You will be changed.

Reviewed in the United States on November 19, 2014

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"Spread your wings over your servant, for you are a redeemer." Ruth 3:9

What happens when an old man, broken from years of suffering, looks into the face of a feral woman who has wandered into his church for shelter? In this moving story, he sees humanity in her face. He sees her loneliness and her sin-ravaged state, but he can see beyond that to a human being, ruined, but not beyond the hope of a redeemer. She is a person in need of compassion and comfort. He offers her a home for her world-weary frame. He marries her.

The story of Lila finds its poetic power in Robinson's unmatched ability to empathize with the human condition. Each page of this story is dripping with compassion and sympathy. The genius is how the very fabric of the story weaves a picture of the deepest desires of every human heart.

Lila, at her core, is a person in desperate need of protection and affection. Here Robinson proves herself to be a master of symbolism. When a shawl is spread over the sickly, neglected, and dying toddler Lila, by a wretched woman overcome by compassion for an unloved child, this shawl and this memory become the defining features of Lila's life. And later, as a forsaken, hopeless, and forlorn grown woman, who has now lost the one person in the world who ever cared for her, Lila finds again someone spreading his dark suit jacket, the one he preaches in, over her freezing shoulders as they walk along the road. Lila says, looking back on that moment: "She thought it was nothing she had known to hope for and something she had wanted too much all the same." A covering, a home, protection. And again: "But if she had prayed in all the years of her old life, it might have been for just that, that gentleness. And if she prayed now, it was really remembering the comfort he put around her, the warmth of his body still in that coat. It was a shock to her, a need she only discovered when it was satisfied, for those few minutes." This story brings to life the theme that we often don't even know what to pray for and that mercy is so much bigger than our imagination.

Robinson is an author who truly understands how to express suffering, estrangement, loneliness, and courage in a breath-taking and lovely story of grace and redemption. She has a deep perceptiveness in the way she portrays the various motives that control the human heart and she writes with forthrightness and blazing accuracy--most of the time.

But this book is not without faults. In this story, she allows her gift of empathy and pity and compassion for the lost to lead her astray and down the road to universalism--the belief that everyone will be in heaven. Lila cannot bear the thought that her beloved adopted mother Doll, the one who had compassion on her when she was a sickly child, did not know about God. When Lila asks the preacher where she is, he caves. He admits he can't bring himself to believe in a hell. In the closing the chapters of the book, Lila imagines everyone who has been kind to her, and even someone who has been cruel to her, all in heaven, and only at this point she begins to believe in heaven. But here Robinson is failing to take her own advice. In several points in the book, Ames tells Lila not to concern herself with things that are too great for her to understand. This would have been an appropriate place to say that again. Ames should have said: Will not the judge of all the earth do what is right? That is the only appropriate answer to Lila's question. There is One who sees all things, knows all things, and nothing escapes his notice. He is impartial and he is merciful. We can have complete faith that he will do what is absolutely right in the end.

But even as Robinson fails miserably in this one point, it does not spoil the whole book. This is not the central theme of the book and I found it easy to look past. There is so much that is still good and beautiful about the book, it was well worth the read in spite of this one fault.

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2 people found this helpful

Mike W.

Mike W.

5

Marilynne Robinson has done it again! Lila is a masterpiece, every bit as powerful as Gilead and Home.

Reviewed in the United States on October 13, 2014

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Born into filth, decay, neglect and apathy, Lila's early childhood is spent hiding under a table in an unwatched corner of a small cabin playing with a makeshift doll made from a walnut shell. It seems the only soul in the world who cares for her is a drifter named Doll, who for reasons not mentioned is also living in the cabin. It is Doll that finds her under the table in the evenings as the temperatures drop, and covers her with a shawl, snuggling with her to keep her warm. It is Doll who tries to ensure that Lila eats and who tries to do more than just acknowledge her existence. When the neglect reaches a point Doll can no longer bear, she absconds with a very ill Lila, saving her life, and raising her as her own. Though Lila has Doll's love, she doesn't have much else as they drift from town to town just before and throughout the depression. As the hard times get harder, they fall in with a group of men and women and work odd jobs while living a homeless lifestyle fraught with danger.

Lila gets only a bit of a grade school education, and is found to be very intelligent by a well meaning teacher who begs Doll to keep Lila enrolled in school. But the economy demands that Lila and Doll continue drifting to survive and Lila never receives further formal education. She does learn a strong work ethic of which she is very proud and which, she states frequently, has aged her and that she wears on her face. Lila makes it clear throughout the novel that she sees herself as worn out, plain, with a hard face, and she often reminisces about others who have told her the same.

When Lila arrives in Gilead, Iowa (Doll no longer her guide in life), she begins to interact with the characters familiar to readers of Robinson's other masterworks, Gilead, and Home. It is not necessary to have read those two novels to appreciate Lila, but they do add a valuable perspective. When Lila meets the incomparable Reverend John Ames, she finds herself confronted with a kindness never before experienced in her lifetime and which she finds so shocking, she repeatedly tries to retreat into her survival reactions of anger, mistrust, and escape. But a kind of spiritual attraction forms; the Reverend sensing a good in Lila that she has had to suppress to survive, and Lila sensing a sincerity and empathy in Ames that she wants to believe is real.

As the two interact, an oddly beautiful love forms, and Robinson weaves a masterful story in which the two take on the deep mysteries of existence, at first in their brief and awkward conversations and progressing into simple but profound discussions. Lila slowly reveals some of the horrors of her past life, and the elderly Ames demonstrates his trademark empathy, and that ability Robinson gives him to boil his Christianity down to its very essence. These discussions are so beautifully written, so powerfully spiritual, that you'll find yourself reading and rereading whether you are a person of faith or not.

Lila and John are married, but the marriage has a tenuous feel as Lila keeps her escape option open seemingly at all times, wondering if all is too good to be true. Reverend Ames acknowledges her fears throughout their time together, and works tirelessly to keep her trust, and convince her that she is loved and worth loving. As more and more is revealed about Lila's background, the reader, along with Reverend Ames, gains an increasingly greater respect for what Lila has endured, and for what she has become.

With Lila, Marilynne Robinson has cemented her legacy as one of the greatest American authors of our lifetime. Lila is every bit as powerful and beautiful as the other two Gilead based novels, and while the theology, philosophy and characters make for a fascinating read, it is Robinson's ability to get to that place, that essence of what it means to be a good person no matter one's faith or lack thereof, that makes her novels so worth reading. She is a master illustrator of the good in humanity, all the while acknowledging the muck and decay amid which it is found.

Lila is absolutely a 2014 must read, and has already been nominated for the National Book Award. It is likely to receive heavy consideration for all of this year's major awards. I highly recommend it.

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4 people found this helpful

NL Amazon Customer

NL Amazon Customer

5

One of my favorite books ever

Reviewed in the United States on July 9, 2024

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I love all Marilynne Robinson's books. They are so moving and thoughtful that I have marked many pages for reference. Often I am inspired to look things up and do further research. This is a profoundly sad story full of questions about humanity yet full of deeply moving inspiration. I don't know how she does it but I am grateful for talented writers like Robinson.

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Roger Brunyate

Roger Brunyate

5

Gilead, Home, and the Undertow of Transience

Reviewed in the United States on October 13, 2014

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So Marilynne Robinson returns once more to the small Iowa town immortalized in her Pulitzer Prizewinning novel

14 people found this helpful

Andres Esguerra

Andres Esguerra

4

A story of grace, forgiveness and healing love

Reviewed in the United States on July 7, 2024

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A very hear warming story of love and care in the midst of poverty and despair. Yet, not an easy read. I found it hard to keep up with the stories of the past and the present.

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