Home (Oprah's Book Club): A Novel
Written by Marilynne Robinson
Narrated by Maggi-Meg Reed
4.5/5
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About this audiobook
Hundreds of thousands were enthralled by the luminous voice of John Ames in 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.
Home is a moving and healing book about families, family secrets, and the passing of the generations, about love and death and faith. It is Robinson's greatest work, an unforgettable embodiment of the deepest and most universal emotions.
Marilynne Robinson
Marilynne Robinson is the author of Gilead, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Home (2008), winner of the Orange Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Lila (2014), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Jack (2020), a New York Times bestseller. Her first novel, Housekeeping (1980), won the PEN/Hemingway Award. Robinson’s nonfiction books include The Givenness of Things (2015), When I Was a Child I Read Books (2012), Absence of Mind (2010), The Death of Adam (1998), and Mother Country (1989). She is the recipient of a 2012 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama, for “her grace and intelligence in writing.” Robinson lives in California
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Reviews for Home (Oprah's Book Club)
35 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This book is so thoughtfully and well written. The empathy the reader is allowed with her main characters brings more meaning and life to each book. Given one word to describe the three I have read so far......”moving”. I look forward to reading Jack.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How I recognized Wendell Berry in her overall plan of writing. This was a boring book. Wendell Berry, too, could be boring. Housekeeping, though, is one of my favorite books of all time. Then I recognized, at least, the same moment of awestriking beauty in Gilead. But where was that in this one? I must have missed it. I do enjoy her writing, always, but this time I was disappointed. No Easter Egg.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Strange to be so picky, but in my newly-decked critical mind, I can’t give this 5 stars (I’m sure I would have in the old days). I am sure once I finish that I will give 5 stars to the whole series. It has something of the palimpsest framing that the Alexandria Quartet did, but in a way that refuses to be post-modern. Indeed, it has a certain obdurate (one of Jack’s words) pre-modern sense to it.
So now, I have had Reverend Ames’ and Gloria’s version—sometimes shockingly in tandem, little sly reveal of twists in the “reality” of the tale. I am anxious to read Lila and Jack though, which means it has taken hold of me.
Certainly the book make you thoughtful, reflective of the ambivalence of this world where the life of the spirit was so dire and awe-ful even in the midst of country simplicity.