LEWISTON – The Lewiston and Auburn public libraries have announced the book selected for their annual community-wide reading program, One Book/One Community, L-A Reads! is “Gilead,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Marilynne Robinson.

The book offers vignettes from 19th-century America as it examines the importance of familial and fraternal threads, which serve to weave through and unite the generations.

Told through the eyes of a Midwestern minister nearing the end of his life, “Gilead” unfolds in the form of a letter. As the reverend writes to his young son, the reader learns of a family’s history and comes to understand the connections that have been important in his life.

These connections include family, his vocation, his lifetime friend, the splendors of the physical world and the young wife and child with whom he has been blessed in his later years.

Lewiston Public Library Director Rick Speer said, “Gilead was chosen both for the quality of the writing and the wide range of possibilities for reflection and discussion.”

The novel garnered last year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was also named a 2004 National Book Critics Circle Winner.

It is available for loan at the Lewiston and Auburn public libraries and may be reserved by calling either library. Copies are available for purchase at a 20 percent discount at Mr. Paperback and the Page Turner in Lewiston and the Book Burrow and WaldenBooks in Auburn.

Activities related to the One Book/One Community program, including book discussion groups, will take place in early April, with details to be announced next month.

One Book/One Community is a partnership of the Lewiston and Auburn public libraries and Lewiston Adult Education, Auburn Adult Education, the Sun Journal and the participating local book stores.

For more information, call the Auburn Public Library at 782-3191 or the Lewiston Public Library at 784-0135.