HomeGroupsTalkMoreZeitgeist
Search Site
This site uses cookies to deliver our services, improve performance, for analytics, and (if not signed in) for advertising. By using LibraryThing you acknowledge that you have read and understand our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Your use of the site and services is subject to these policies and terms.

Results from Google Books

Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.

Home: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson
Loading...

Home: A Novel (original 2008; edition 2008)

by Marilynne Robinson (Author)

Series: Gilead (2)

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
3,7701493,284 (3.98)613
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.
Member:Cyss
Title:Home: A Novel
Authors:Marilynne Robinson (Author)
Info:Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2008), Edition: 1st, 333 pages
Collections:Your library
Rating:
Tags:None

Work Information

Home by Marilynne Robinson (2008)

Loading...

Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.

No current Talk conversations about this book.

» See also 613 mentions

English (145)  Dutch (3)  Spanish (2)  French (1)  All languages (151)
Showing 1-5 of 145 (next | show all)
Reason read: botm 3/2024, Reading 1001. This is a novel about family, family secrets, passing generations, forgiveness, and death. I read the first book set in Gilead and this is the second book. The characters are Glory and her prodigal brother Jack. The Reverend Robert Boughton is old and dying. Glory has come home to take care of her dad and Jack has returned hoping to mend fences with himself and his family.

I enjoyed this book as much as I enjoyed Gilead and I've read Housekeeping. I want to read Lila and Jack. I find the stories good because they're about family not that I think the authors Christian values are perfect because I don't think they are but I also think that would make for good discussions.

This book won the Orange Prize of what is now the Women's Prize. 2009 ( )
  Kristelh | Mar 12, 2024 |
This is a quietly devastating book - written in a very low key way, but very precise and very moving. The adult children returning home struggle to work out how to live together and with their aging father. Its awkward and difficult for everyone, but the family love means they have to try. ( )
  AlisonSakai | Feb 15, 2024 |
A very well written book that many would rate a five star. The in depth character study of family, faith, and a lost soul of a prodigal son that wants to come home. Excellent writing that I can identify.
Still... I was lost at times with the observations and conversations of the characters. Nothing really grasped me with a true interest, so I was left with wanting to finish and move on to the next book. More three stars for me personally, so I leave it as an orphan in between at four stars. ( )
  wvlibrarydude | Jan 14, 2024 |
After finishing the book I read the reviews in the frontpiece which were so elegantly perceptive that I am certain I can't contribute any deeper analysis. I have been a Robinson fan since reading Housekeeping a very long time ago. Not much happened in that book but it was like reading poetry. The same here. Not much happens, the background is the day to day life of a brother and sister taking care of their failing father over a few weeks, but the prose just blew me away: "The words were bright as a prick of blood" (p320)"...the fierce breath of his grief" (p 298). While I don't relate to the themes and musings on the Bible and Protestantism in this pastor's family, it was nonetheless interesting. It is a sad book, an alternative title could have been 'The Stranger' for Jack always felt apart in his family and beyond. One thing is certain I will read Gilead after this. Despite the sadness a thought proviking and moving experience, thank you M.R. ( )
  amaraki | Sep 15, 2023 |
A deeply spiritual, sensitive and touching story, told gently but with breathtaking command. The mystical connection between the secret and the sacred, the predestined and the deserved, the possibility that God can use a man’s children to punish him for his sins, and so much more. Robinson’s work occupies a space of its own. ( )
  brook11trout | May 6, 2023 |
Showing 1-5 of 145 (next | show all)
The glories of Gilead - and of Housekeeping, for that matter - have not quite found their way into Home. One reason for this may be Robinson's decision to write in the third person for the first time, thus suppressing one of her great gifts, which is the mix of wryness, wisdom and self-deprecation with which she infused her first two narrators' voices.
 
But what remains is Gilead's sense of how character, however unkindly, determines one's fate, which in Home arrives silently but powerfully, like a glacier leaving a raw gash in the landscape. Robinson's output may also be glacial, but the force her words leave in her wake is unmistakable.
added by melmore | editNPR, Lizzie Skurnick (Sep 19, 2008)
 
These ugly facts [of small-town racism] complicate the beauty of “Home,” but the way Robinson embeds them in the novel is part of what makes it so beautiful. It is a book unsparing in its acknowledgment of sin and unstinting in its belief in the possibility of grace. It is at once hard and forgiving, bitter and joyful, fanatical and serene. It is a wild, eccentric, radical work of literature that grows out of the broadest, most fertile, most familiar native literary tradition. What a strange old book it is.
added by melmore | editNew York Times, A. O. Scott (Sep 19, 2008)
 
The Reverend Boughton, is in decline. Glory, the youngest of his eight children, has come home to care for him, and both are grateful and alarmed when Jack, the prodigal son, reappears after an excruciating 20-year absence. Once a charming scoundrel, Jack is now riddled with regrets and despair. As she cares for two broken men struggling toward reconciliation and redemption, Glory is a paragon of patience, a virtue readers also must cultivate as Robinson follows an austere narrative regime, confining the reader to the day-by-day present and the Boughton home. Household chores are infused with metaphysical implications, while what is not said carries more weight than what is spoken. Robinson wrestles with moral dilemmas ordinary and catastrophic, and ponders the mystery of why human beings never feel wholly at home on earth. This is a rigorous, sometimes claustrophobic, yet powerfully spiritual novel of anguish and prayer, wisdom and beauty, penance and hope.
added by kthomp25 | editBooklist, Donna Seaman
 

» Add other authors (10 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Robinson, Marilynneprimary authorall editionsconfirmed
Kampmann, EvaTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Reed, Maggie-MegNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Vlek, RonaldTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
You must log in to edit Common Knowledge data.
For more help see the Common Knowledge help page.
Canonical title
Original title
Alternative titles
Original publication date
People/Characters
Important places
Important events
Related movies
Epigraph
Dedication
For Noah and Elise
and for Beatrice
First words
"Home to stay, Glory! Yes!" her father said, and her heart sank.
Quotations
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, ever grace, through all the long years. It was a beauty that would not be apparent to every eye.
”Yes,” the old man said, as he did when memory stirred. “Those were good times.”
No, it's a feeling I have always had, almost since you were a baby. As though there was something you needed from me and I never figured out what it was. … I just never knew another child who didn't feel at home in the house where he was born.
They had always been so careful of him, almost afraid to touch him. There was an aloofness about him more thoroughgoing than modesty or reticence. It was feral, and fragile. It had enforced a peculiar decorum on them all, even on their mother. There was always the moment when they acknowledged this – no hugging, no roughhousing could include him. Even his father patted his shoulder tentatively, shy and cautious. Whey should a child have defended his loneliness that way? But let him have his ways, their father said, or he would be gone. He'd smile at them across that distance, and the smile was sad and hard, and it meant estrangement, even when he was with them.
How all the brothers and sisters except Jack had loved to come home, and how ready they always were to leave again.
Last words
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
Disambiguation notice
Publisher's editors
Blurbers
Original language
Canonical DDC/MDS
Canonical LCC

References to this work on external resources.

Wikipedia in English (1)

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.

No library descriptions found.

Book description
Haiku summary

LibraryThing Early Reviewers Alum

Marilynne Robinson's book Home was available from LibraryThing Early Reviewers.

Current Discussions

None

Popular covers

Quick Links

Rating

Average: (3.98)
0.5 4
1 12
1.5
2 30
2.5 16
3 106
3.5 44
4 209
4.5 59
5 220

Is this you?

Become a LibraryThing Author.

 

About | Contact | Privacy/Terms | Help/FAQs | Blog | Store | APIs | TinyCat | Legacy Libraries | Early Reviewers | Common Knowledge | 203,186,437 books! | Top bar: Always visible