Storytelling is at the heart of their courtship, and the way they honor each other’s backstories-Lila tending to roses on the grave of John’s first wife John praying for Doll. This is why love, like grace, puts loved ones beyond all the usual categories of admiration or disapproval, and experiences a kind of wonder in the fact of their being who they are, as they are. John Ames writes in Gilead about the startling privilege of really knowing someone, sensing a soul, which makes ordinary knowing feel slight and superficial. Where did you begin with imagining their love story? Did they surprise you? The love story that unfolds in Lila begins for me in Gilead, in the scene where she says, “You ought to marry me,” and he says, “You’re right, I will.” That moment surprised me, but it felt like a point of fusion between the characters as I understood them, something beyond the mutual recognition they feel despite all differences. Their intimacy holds the promise of a kind of redemption, but there’s pain in it, too. This is a love story, the best kind, in that both parties-Lila and John-are taken by surprise by their feelings for each other, and are changed by each other. Via email, we discussed their connection-and what attracts her to characters who fall outside social conventions. Fiercely intelligent, Lila is Robinson’s most powerful character to date her courtship with John, touchingly tender as they win each other’s trust, is the centerpiece of this masterly inquiry into the comforts and limitations of love.

To him, warily, she relays her story, challenging him to reconcile it with the tenets of his faith. First glimpsed in Gilead, we see here how Lila meets and falls in love with the widowed Reverend John Ames. Lila (FSG) is the story of a stranger’s unmaking-a process that, we understand from the outset, will not be without internal violence. In **Marilynne Robinson’**s third novel set in an imaginary town in the Midwest, a young woman appears, solitary and searching, her single prized possession the knife that belonged to the migrant drifter who raised her.

Lila robinson