This is Robinson’s second book about Gilead, Iowa in the 1950’s and the Broughton and Ames families. In this beautiful and lyrical story, Jack returns to his father’s home after a 20-year absence to find his younger sibling, Glory, caring for the dying patriarch. Jack has a lifelong history of bad behavior, and his return comes with the pain of the past (a child fathered out of wedlock) as well as the real, live struggles of father/son and brother/sister.

“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 the sense that things should be otherwise, and then the thought of what is wanting and what alleviation would be, and how one soul could be put at ease, restores at home. But the soul finds its own home if it ever has a home at all.”