If Robinson's first novel, Housekeeping, published in 1980, hadn't been such a huge hit, her reticence would be unremarkable. She is robust, with a steady, amused gaze propped up on high cheekbones and a poodle fussing around her called Otis, so named, she says, because it didn't 'seem very poodleish'. When she opens her door in Iowa City, a leafy college town where she teaches creative writing, the 65-year-old doesn't look agonised, or reclusive, or - an expectation raised by her enthusiasm for 18th-century theology and books with the word 'Trinitarianism' in the title - in the Joyce Carol Oates school of brittle academics. Robinson's sporadic output - three novels and two books of non-fiction in 28 years, with a 24-year gap between the first and second novels - is assumed to be a function of ambition, of her painstaking attempt to tell stories through thought and not action. They don't go anywhere, do anything, see anyone besides their neighbours, and the town itself doesn't change - an odd choice of set-up for a novelist, but one that permits her to make a suggestion: that it is people in their kitchens, devastating each other softly and for the most part without intent, that constitutes life at its most indivisible. It is Robinson's greatest work, an unforgettable embodiment of the deepest and most universal emotions.T he small town of Gilead, in which two of Marilynne Robinson's three novels are set, is 'a dogged little outpost' in Iowa, where her characters live modestly and scorn themselves for staying put. Home is a moving and healing book about families, family secrets, and the passing of the generations, about love and death and faith. Brilliant, lovable, and wayward, Jack forges an intense bond with Glory and engages painfully with Ames, his godfather and namesake. 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.

Jack is one of the great characters in recent literature. 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. 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.

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