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Home: A Novelby Marilynne Robinson
Awards
Staff Pick
Set in the same time and place as Gilead, Marilynne Robinson's new masterpiece is at once profoundly sad and hopeful.
Where Gilead was an introspective masterpiece of reflection and contemplation, Home is a refreshingly honest portrait of familial relationships over time. Robinson carefully breathes life into these characters with each passing sentence, until by the end of the book you are completely immersed in the Boughton family's travails, and in love with every single one of them. Here is one family you'll never forget, written by an author who somehow manages (amazingly) to get better with each book. Review-a-Day (What is Review-a-Day?)"Home is a companion piece to Gilead, an account of the same time (the summer of 1956), in the same place (Gilead, Iowa), with the same cast of characters as the earlier novel. Each book is strengthened and deepened by a reading of the other. It is tempting, indeed, to liken them to the gospels, dovetailing versions of the same epiphanic experiences, each with its particular revelations, omissions, and emphases; except that instead of telling the stories of Christ, Robinson's novels tell those of the all-too-human antihero, the struggling prodigal son, Jack Boughton." Claire Messud, the New York Review of Books (read the entire New York Review of Books review) Synopses & ReviewsPublisher Comments:Hundreds of thousands were enthralled by the luminous voice of John Ames in Gilead, Marilynne Robinson's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Home is an entirely independent, deeply affecting novel that takes place concurrently in the same locale, this time in the household of Reverend Robert Boughton, Ames's closest friend.
Glory Boughton, aged thirty-eight, has returned to Gilead to care for her dying father. Soon her brother, Jack — the prodigal son of the family, gone for twenty years — comes home too, looking for refuge and trying to make peace with a past littered with tormenting trouble and pain. Jack is one of the great characters in recent literature. A bad boy from childhood, an alcoholic who cannot hold a job, he is perpetually at odds with his surroundings and with his traditionalist father, though he remains Boughton's most beloved child. Brilliant, lovable, and wayward, Jack forges an intense bond with Glory and engages painfully with Ames, his godfather and namesake. Home is a moving and healing book about families, family secrets, and the passing of the generations, about love and death and faith. It is Robinson's greatest work, an unforgettable embodiment of the deepest and most universal emotions. Review:"Robinson's beautiful new novel, a companion piece to her Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead, is an elegant variation on the parable of the prodigal son's return. The son is Jack Boughton, one of the eight children of Robert Boughton, the former Gilead, Iowa, pastor, who now, in 1957, is a widowed and dying man. Jack returns home shortly after his sister, 38-year-old Glory, moves in to nurse their father, and it is through Glory's eyes that we see Jack's drama unfold. When Glory last laid eyes on Jack, she was 16, and he was leaving Gilead with a reputation as a thief and a scoundrel, having just gotten an underage girl pregnant. By his account, he'd since lived as a vagrant, drunk and jailbird until he fell in with a woman named Della in St. Louis. By degrees, Jack and Glory bond while taking care of their father, but when Jack's letters to Della are returned unopened, Glory has to deal with Jack's relapse into bad habits and the effect it has on their father. In giving an ancient drama of grace and perdition such a strong domestic setup, Robinson stakes a fierce claim to a divine recognition behind the rituals of home. (Sept.)" Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.) Review:Marilynne Robinson's mournful new novel, "Home," is not a sequel or a prequel to her Pulitzer Prize-winning "Gilead" (2004) but rather a companion. And companionship, it turns out, is what all the lonely people in this book are seeking. Set in the same Iowa town, just a short distance from Rev. John Ames, the dying narrator of "Gilead," the events in "Home" take place concurrently with those of that... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) Review:"Robinson wrestles with moral dilemmas ordinary and catastrophic....[A] rigorous, sometimes claustrophobic, yet powerfully spiritual novel of anguish and prayer, wisdom and beauty, penance and hope." Booklist Review:"Fans of Gilead will be grateful for this expansion of the story — and for its closing hint of a possible return to the extended Ames/Boughton families....Highly recommended." Library Journal Review:"[A] thoughtful, exceedingly patient, examination of the nature of grace and perdition. It's a measure of her abilities that, even though a reader knows precisely what's coming, she's able to break hearts all over again." The Christian Science Monitor Review:"One of the pleasures of reading Home is Robinson's light touch with what readers may already know from a sojourn in Gilead....If I cannot do Home justice in describing it, I can, at least, commend it to you with my whole heart." Los Angeles Times Review:"Not all that much happens in Home and yet the scenes are brilliantly delineated....This is the pleasure of Home: witnessing these people learn, painfully, to tend to the soul — their own souls and those of the ones they love." The Portland Oregonian Review:"Home lacks the fablelike intensity and visual, metaphoric dazzle of her much-loved first novel, Housekeeping....[A] static, even suffocating narrative in which very little is dramatized...and it makes the characters, especially Jack, seem terribly self-absorbed." Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times Review:"If Home is a lesser novel than Gilead, it still calls up the surpassing gracefulness of Robinson's best writing, as well as its — there's no better word — spirit." The Chicago Sun-Times Synopsis:The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gilead pens a moving and healing book about families, family secrets, and the passing of the generations. About the AuthorMarilynne Robinson is the author of the novels Gilead (FSG, 2004) — winner of the Pulitzer Prize — and Housekeeping (FSG, 1980), and two books of nonfiction, Mother Country (FSG, 1989) and The Death of Adam. She teaches at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. What Our Readers Are SayingAdd a comment for a chance to win!
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