It is Robinson’s greatest work, an unforgettable embodiment of the deepest and most universal emotions. About the Author Marilynne Robinson is the author of Gilead, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award Home (2008), winner of the Orange Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Lila (2014), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and Jack (2020), a New York Times bestseller.

Home is a moving and healing book about families, family secrets, and the passing of the generations, about love and death and faith. A bad boy from childhood, an alcoholic who cannot hold a job, he is perpetually at odds with his surroundings and with his traditionalist father, though he remains Boughton’s most beloved child.īrilliant, lovable, and wayward, Jack forges an intense bond with Glory and engages painfully with Ames, his godfather and namesake. After Helen commits suicide and Ruth and Lucille go live with their grandmother Sylvia Foster in Idaho, theyre passed around to various relatives until Sylvie. Jack is one of the great characters in recent literature. I have this sense of urgency about what I want to get done and I discipline myself by keeping to myself, she said. And he tells a story of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, which are tested in his tender and strained relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friends wayward son. Her intellectual and creative ambitions leave little time for socializing. She is divorced, and her two sons are grown with families of their own. 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 tormenting trouble and pain. Robinson leads a relatively solitary life. Glory Boughton, aged thirty-eight, has returned to Gilead to care for her dying father.

Home is an entirely independent, deeply affecting novel that takes place concurrently in the same locale, this time in the household of Reverend Robert Boughton, Ames’s closest friend. Hundreds of thousands were enthralled by the luminous voice of John Ames in Gilead, Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel.

Home marilynne robinson summary