Marilynne Robinson
Home
Farrar, Straus &
Giroux
CITATION
Home demonstrates
that quiet prose can contain ecstasies and quiet souls
dramas of raging moral intensity. A faithful daughter
and a prodigal son return to their childhood home, where
their clergyman father is dying, to reacquaint not only
with one another but with the demands of forgiveness.
Marilynne Robinson's fiction grapples with such issues
as the nature of goodness and the limits of understanding,
bringing to its explorations a spiritual precision and
redemptive beauty.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marilynne Robinson is the author
of the novels Gilead (FSG, 2004)—winner
of the Pulitzer Prize—and Housekeeping
(FSG, 1980), and two books of nonfiction, Mother
Country (FSG, 1989) and The Death of Adam.
She teaches at the University of Iowa Writers’
Workshop.
ABOUT
THE BOOK (from the publisher)
Gilead, Marilynne
Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel.
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.
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.
Jack is one of the great characters
in recent literature. 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.
Brilliant, lovable, and wayward, Jack forges an intense
bond with Glory and engages painfully with Ames, his
godfather and namesake.
AUTHOR APPEARANCES
WISCONSIN BOOK FESTIVAL
Wisconsin Historical Society-Library Mall
816 State Street
Madison, WI
10/18/2008 7:00PM
LOS ANGELES PUBLIC LIBRARY
630 W. 5th St.
Los Angeles, CA
10/23/2008 7:00PM
UCSB ARTS & LECTURES
University of California
Building 402
Santa Barbara, CA
10/24/2008 7:30PM
BOOK PASSAGE
51 Tamal Vista Blvd.
Corte Madera, CA
10/26/2008 2:00PM
CITY ARTS & LECTURES
1955 Sutter Street
San Francisco, CA
10/27/2008 8:00PM
PRAIRIE LIGHTS @ ENGLERT
THEATRE
15 S. Dubuque St.
Iowa City, IA
11/3/2008 7:00PM
SUGGESTED LINKS
Marilynne Robinson speaks
about Home on NPR's Weekend Edition
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94799720
EXCERPT
Excerpted from Home by Marilynne Robinson. Copyright
© 2008 by Marilynne Robinson. Published in September
2008 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.
“Home to stay, Glory!
Yes!” her father said, and her heart sank. He
attempted a twinkle of joy at this thought, but his
eyes were damp with commiseration. “To stay for
a while this time!” he amended, and took her bag
from her, first shifting his cane to his weaker hand.
Dear God, she thought, dear God in
heaven. So began and ended all her prayers these days,
which
were really cries of amazement. How could her father
be so frail?
And how could he be so recklessly intent on satisfying
his notions
of gentlemanliness, hanging his cane on the railing
of the stairs so
he could, dear God, carry her bag up to her room? But
he did it,
and then he stood by the door, collecting himself.
“This is the nicest room.
According to Mrs. Blank.” He indicated
the windows. “Cross ventilation. I don’t
know. They all
seem nice to me.” He laughed. “Well, it’s
a good house.” The
house embodied for him the general blessedness of his
life, which
was manifest, really indisputable. And which he never
failed to
acknowledge, especially when it stood over against particular
sorrow.
Even more frequently after their mother died he spoke
of
the house as if it were an old wife, beautiful for every
comfort it
had offered, every grace, through all the long years.
It was a
beauty that would not be apparent to every eye. It was
too tall for
the neighborhood, with a flat face and a flattened roof
and peaked
brows over the windows. “Italianate,” her
father said, but that
was a guess, or a rationalization. In any case, it managed
to look
both austere and pretentious despite the porch her father
had had
built on the front of it to accommodate the local taste
for socializing
in the hot summer evenings, and which had become overgrown
by an immense bramble of trumpet vines. It was a good
house, her father said, meaning that it had a gracious
heart however
awkward its appearance. And now the gardens and the
shrubbery were disheveled, as he must have known, though
he
rarely ventured beyond the porch.
Excerpted from Home by Marilynne Robinson. Copyright
© 2008 by Marilynne Robinson. Published in September
2008 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.
|
