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Home

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

WINNER OF THE ORANGE PRIZE • OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST

Glory Boughton 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 torment and pain.

A troubled boy from childhood, an alcoholic who cannot hold a job, Jack is one of the great characters in recent literature. He is perpetually at odds with his surroundings and with his traditionalist father, though he remains Reverend Boughton's most beloved child. Brilliant, beguiling, lovable and wayward, Jack forges an intense new bond with Glory and engages painfully with John 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 arguably Marilynne Robinson's greatest work, an unforgettable embodiment of the deepest and most universal emotions.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from June 30, 2008
      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.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from November 24, 2008
      Robinson's third novel, and second returning to the Iowan home of ministers John Ames and Robert Boughton, is a conflict between the responsible father and his prodigal son. Robinson's style is old-fashioned, puzzling over timeless concerns like faith and responsibility. Maggi-Meg Reed is perfectly amenable, retreating into the audio attic and retrieving some of the creakier techniques: a singsong cadence, a hoarse Yankee assurance—a Walter Brennanesque tone—for the Reverend Boughton. That these work so well is testament to Reed, who offered an excellent reading of The Time Traveler's Wife
      . It is also a sign of the essential rightness of this particular reading for Robinson's novel. In writing of clergymen and faith, Robinson's prose is near-biblical; Reed's voice conveys a similar depth of feeling and simplicity of expression. A Farrar, Straus & Giroux hardcover (Reviews, June 30).

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  • English

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