And yet at the back of Robinson’s dioramas loom distant, blood-soaked events: She traces a seam in the prairie sod to a moment when the word abolition hung in the air, when Ames’s father was a boy, when John Brown thundered along Pottawatomie Creek. These narratives overlap chronologically, like a Cubist canvas dissecting the social landscape of rural America through diverse perspectives. Play icon The triangle icon that indicates to play

Jack, as he’s known, is the adored black sheep of the family, who seemingly comes and goes at his pleasure. Robert Boughton has even named his favorite son after Ames. Together, the two men of the cloth ponder theological and moral questions.

One thread that runs throughout Gilead-as well as Home (2008), Lila (2014), and Jack (2020)-is the intricate weave of relationships between the Ames family and the Boughtons, whose patriarch, a Presbyterian minister, is John Ames’s best friend. Reverend Ames is elderly, in his 70s his much younger wife and son are grace notes to a life lived, somewhat ambivalently, in the service of his lord. What her characters yearn for is nothing less than God. Here’s a writer who listens to us all, as well as to the yearnings of her characters. Robinson has spent the better part of two decades, in four stand-alone novels that connect through their characters and settings, exploring the notion that, as the author has observed, beauty is “a casual glimpse of something ordinary.” Her moral authority is commanding, and her ear for our country’s language-its conversational rhythms, its plainspokenness-is impeccable. This companion piece to Robinson's Pulitzer-winning Gilead, now the winner of this year's Orange prize, is a stunning novel, meditative and compelling, incantatory, breathtaking and ultimately devastating.Just a few pages into the novel the reader can see why it won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005-and why it continues to enthrall. Still, as he says, 'It is a powerful thing, family,' and the three struggle towards peace, wrestling with pasts, mistakes, tragedies too big even to discuss. And Robert, the patriarch, is confused at how his loud, busy family has been reduced to this. She knows and accepts that a home of her own will never be a part of her story. There he finds his heartbroken sister Glory, surely the novel's true driving force, back home to care for her ailing father, embarrassed at 'being somewhere because there was nowhere else for you to be'. The prodigal son Jack, 'a child who didn't feel at home in the house where he was born', and is both sinned against and sinning, has returned after two decades, unable to mention the baby girl he abandoned and who died in his absence. T here is nothing redemptive in the home of Robinson's title.

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