Home - Couverture souple

MARILYNNE ROBINSON is the recipient of a 2012 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama, for “her grace and intelligence in writing.” In 2013 she was awarded South Korea’s Park Kyong-ni Prize for her contribution to international literature. She is the author of Lila, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and a finalist for the National Book Award; Gilead, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Home, winner of the Orange Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and a finalist for the National Book Award. Her first novel, Housekeeping, won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. Robinson’s non-fiction books include The Givenness of Things, When I Was a Child I Read Books, Absence of Mind, The Death of Adam, and Mother Country, which was nominated for a National Book Award. She lives in Iowa City, where she taught at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop for twenty-five years. 

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.