WINNER OF THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2009
AN OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK
Jack Boughton – prodigal son – has been gone twenty years. He returns home seeking refuge and to make peace with the past. A bad boy from childhood, an alcoholic who cannot hold down a job, Jack is perpetually at odds with his surroundings and with his traditionalist father, though he remains Boughton’s most beloved child. His sister Glory has also returned, fleeing her own mistakes, to care for their dying father. A moving book about families, about love and death and faith, Home is unforgettable. It is a masterpiece.
‘One of the greatest living novelists’ BRYAN APPLEYARD, SUNDAY TIMES
‘A luminous, profound and moving piece of writing. There is no contemporary American novelist whose work I would rather read’ MICHAEL ARDITTI, INDEPENDENT
‘Her novels are replete with a sense of felt life, with a deep and abiding sympathy for her characters and a full understanding of their inner lives’ COLM TOIBIN
‘Utterly haunting’ JANE SHILLING, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
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Reviews
Covering the same time-frame and some of the same ground as Gilead, this is a quietly moving novel of faith and forgiveness. Of the two, Gilead might still have the broader appeal, but Home has its own solemn beauty
Now let me be clear - I'm not saying that you're actually dead if you haven't read Marilynne Robinson, but I honestly couldn't say you're fully alive... One of the greatest living novelists
Her novels are replete with a sense of felt life, with a deep and abiding sympathy for her characters and a full understanding of their inner lives
At its best, her fiction attends with rapt attention to the "dear ordinary", breathing fresh air into the long-standing debates of American Protestantism
This is a novel of subtlety and power, which examines the fraught relationships we have with those who love us most. It will more than satisfy Robinson's fans. You don't need to have read Gilead to enjoy Home, but you will want to once you have finished
An exquisitely measured portrait of family dynamics and the workings of the human heart. Not to be missed
An exquisite third novel
Like its predecessor, Home is most notable for its spirituality. Its language has a scriptural power and resonance. Much of the imagery is biblical, especially of Jack, who is both Prodigal Son and Penitent Thief and, finally, even the "Man of Sorrows" . . . it is a luminous, profound and moving piece of writing. There is no contemporary American novelist whose work I would rather read
This is certainly a novel about faith and love. However, it is also a meditation on doubt and fear . . . There is both a subtlety and a simplicity about her most powerful themes. She asserts the elusiveness of perfection, the foolishness of severe self-judgement and the unavoidable necessity of having to suffer in order to love . . . The beauty of Home is that it does not offer the counterfeit currency of certainty but proffers the under-valued coin of hope. That is its glory, too
One of the cleverest things about Home is its interplay with Gilead. While the earlier Gilead is the more faultless novel, Home is in some ways the more interesting, since it deals in grey areas rather than in simple decency
The theme-and-variations relationship of Gilead and Home might seem, in theory, like an academic exercise, but in the practice it is not. Robinson is a great technician, but technique is the starting-point of her writing, not its object, which is to write, gravely and with a humanity so carefully considered as to have the appearance of simplicity, about the errors, regrets and dire misunderstandings of human life: what can be forgiven and repaired, and what cannot. The cadences of her prose have a resonant authority more like that of great music than language. The effect is utterly haunting. The bad news is that it makes all other writing seem jejune for ages afterwards
Home's greatest strength is its ability to suggest the larger schisms and rumblings that lie beyond and below the apparently slight movements of its plot . . . likewise, Home develops even further Robinson's investment of the most seemingly throwaway phrases with the greatest of emotional depth and pain
There are very few novels written by living novelists that I wish I had written myself and Marilynne Robinson has written two of them. The two novels, while perfectly capable of being read independently, form a diptych. The heart of this utterly absorbing, precisely observed, marvellous novel is the fumbling inadequacy of love, its inability to avert our terrible capacity to wound and maim, not even but especially, those nearest and dearest to us
The power and grace of Robinson's prose is as much in evidence in the new novel as in Gilead
As delicately and sadly as in a folk ballad, Robinson describes the return of a prodigal son. His father is frail, his sister Grace is disappointed in love and bad boy Jack is tormented by mishaps, mistakes and alcoholism. Always an outsider in their large family, Jack is seeking refuge and redemption. But, as Robinson reveals, the past has a way of leaving an indelible impression, and sometimes the most difficult person to forgive is yourself
Marilynne Robinson has emerged as one of America's greatest contemporary novelists. Home reads like the obbligato beneath Gilead's descant: where Gilead is consoling, Home is almost frighteningly sad; where Gilead offers benediction, Home offers only valediction. Home is a book of sorrows, of disappointment, and of the fragile, improbable ways in which home, even when it is shadowed by failure and guilt, can offer hope . . . divine comfort is the foundation of Home, one of the saddest books I have ever loved
Robinson's prose is beautiful and lusciously startling. The minute observation of character, the tiny traces that are achieved through discretion, deference and apology, make this novel seem charged with a gritty, hard-won hope. Robinson insists on the impossibility of love yet celebrates it manifestation on every page in the small, exquisite gestures of grace her flawed characters manage, in their failure, to bestow on one another
Little House on the Prairie grows up. Robinson has written just two previous novels in her long lifetime and both have wowed the critics. This is like a modern-day Cranford, using small-town life to throw light on universal dilemmas
A powerful piece of writing
This companion piece to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead is a quiet yet devastatingly poignant portrait of a family longing to heal, searching for answers to questions of faith and morality, and unravelling the ties of family relationships