Home

Home is an entirely independent novel that takes place concurrently in the same locale as Marilynne Robinson’s earlier novel Gilead, this time in the household of Reverend Robert Boughton, Ames’s closest friend.

Glory Boughton, aged thirty-eight, 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 tormenting trouble and pain.

A bad boy from childhood, an alcoholic who cannot hold a job, Jack is perpetually at odds with his surroundings and with his traditionalist father, though he remains Boughton’s most beloved child. Brilliant, lovable, and wayward, Jack forges an intense bond with Glory and engages painfully with Ames, his godfather and namesake.

Home is a book about families, family secrets, and the passing of the generations, about love and death and faith.