Lila is a young woman who was raised in poverty and spent most of her life drifting across America after being rescued from an abusive home by a woman named Doll. When she arrives in Gilead and wanders into the local church, she is drawn to the quiet kindness of the elderly Reverend John Ames. The two eventually marry, and Lila begins to build a life in the town while reflecting on her difficult past and grappling with questions of faith, love, and belonging. Quiet and deeply reflective, the novel explores grace, redemption, and the possibility of finding a home after a lifetime of hardship. It fits the Reader’s Bookshelf theme of the year perfectly, asking what truly makes a home and whether we must deserve one. A tender, thoughtful, and deeply moving story.
“This is not to say that joy is a compensation for loss, but that each of them, joy and loss, exists in its own right and must be recognized for what it is. Sorrow is very real, and loss feels very final to us. Life on earth is difficult and grave, and marvelous. Our experience is fragmentary. Its parts don’t add up. They don’t even belong in the same calculation. Sometimes it is hard to believe they are all parts of one thing. Nothing makes sense until we understand that experience does not accumulate like money, or memory, or like years and frailties. Instead, it is presented to us by a God who is not under any obligation to the past except in His eternal, freely given constancy.’ Because I don’t mean to suggest that experience is random or accidental, you see. ‘When I say that much the greater part of our existence is unknowable by us because it rests with God, who is unknowable, I acknowledge His grace in allowing us to feel that we know any slightest part of it. Therefore we have no way to reconcile its elements, because they are what we are given out of no necessity at all except God’s grace in sustaining us as creatures we can recognize as ourselves.’ That’s always seemed remarkable to me, that we can do that. That we can’t help but do it. ‘So joy can be joy and sorrow can be sorrow, with neither of them casting either light or shadow on the other.”