Description

WINNER OF THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2009

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

Publisher Review

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 sever self-ju * HERALD * 'So finely wrought as to make the work of her more productive contemporaries seem tawdry by comparison . . . The cadences of her prose have a resonant authority more like that of a great music rather than language. The effect is utterly haunting. The bad news is that is makes all other writing seem jejune for ages afterwards * Jane Shilling, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH * 'A quietly moving novel of faith and forgiveness. * Amber Pearson, DAILY MAIL * Her fiction attends with rapt attention to the "dear ordinary" breathing fresh air into the long-standing debates of American Protestantism * Kasia Boddy, DAILY TELEGRAPH * Her poetic, almost biblical style of writing...flows like clear cold water and is full of quiet power while remaining oddly conversational... People say they love these books, and I can see why. Quite how they can do so without discerning within them a serious, deep, patient but modest defence of the Christian proposition, I do not know. * Mail Online * Her poetic, almost biblical style of writing...flows like clear cold water and is full of quiet power while remaining oddly conversational... People say they love these books, and I can see why. Quite how they can do so without discerning within them a serious, deep, patient but modest defence of the Christian proposition, I do not know. * Mail Online * ...a country of mystical sunsets, abandoned shacks, storms that could have come out of the book of Job, snowstorms that that can take your life within a few feet of your own front door, and wild rivers in which one can be baptized. I said Marilynne Robinson's prose was like clear, cold water and so it is - and sometimes it is about water too - you are never far from its cleansing, chilly power, or from the mysterious rush of the wind, sounding like the ocean in a region impossibly far from any sea. * Mail Online * ...a country of mystical sunsets, abandoned shacks, storms that could have come out of the book of Job, snowstorms that that can take your life within a few feet of your own front door, and wild rivers in which one can be baptized. I said Marilynne Robinson's prose was like clear, cold water and so it is - and sometimes it is about water too - you are never far from its cleansing, chilly power, or from the mysterious rush of the wind, sounding like the ocean in a region impossibly far from any sea. * Mail Online *