Home: Winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction - Softcover

Robinson, Marilynne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1844085503 ISBN 13: 9781844085507

Publisher: Virago Press Ltd, 2009

Synopsis

WINNER OF THE ORANGE PRIZE

Hundreds of thousands of readers were enthralled and delighted by the luminous, tender voice of John Ames in Gilead, Marilynne Robinson's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

Now comes HOME, a deeply affecting novel that takes place in the same period and same Iowa town of Gilead. This is Jack's story. Jack - prodigal son of the Boughton family, godson and namesake of John Ames, gone twenty years - has come home looking for refuge and to try to make peace with a past littered with trouble and pain. 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 to Gilead, fleeing her own mistakes, to care for their dying father. Brilliant, loveable, wayward, Jack forges an intense new bond with Glory and engages painfully with his father and his father's old friend John Ames.

About this title

Review:

...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. (Peter Hitchens 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. (Peter Hitchens Mail Online)

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)

'A quietly moving novel of faith and forgiveness. (Amber Pearson, DAILY MAIL)

'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)

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)

Book Description:

From the author of the magnificent, award-winning GILEAD comes a masterpiece novel that returns to the people and places of Gilead. Winner of the ORANGE PRIZE

About this edition

• Publisher: Virago Press Ltd
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1844085503
• ISBN 13: 9781844085507
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352