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Marilynne Robinson

A novel where so much is implicit in the characters, storyline and setting. It's as if the author is saying - 'you are human and have lived, make of these people what you will, for in your heart you already know them'. How painfully true that we tend to reduce those closest to us to stereotypes - the pastor, the prodigal son, the spinster daughter- and when the years have flown, find it impossible to rebuild real relationships.

Extract

That odd capacity for destitution, as if by nature we ought to have so much more than nature gives us. As if we are shockingly unclothed when we lack the complacencies of ordinary life. In destitution, even of feeling or purpose, a human being is more hauntingly human and vulnerable to kindnesses because there is a sense that things should be otherwise, and then the thought of what is wanting and what alleviation would be, and how the soul could be put at ease, restored. At home. But the soul finds its own home if it ever has a home at all.

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