Marilynne Robinson

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. 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...