If 'Gilead' is a book about Ames the Congregationalist minister and his life, then 'Home' is the story of his fellow Presbyterian preacher and lifelong friend Robert Boughton and his rambunctious family. This is a book about intricate family relationships, and with a figure like Jack Boughton, the family's black sheep, it is bound to captivate. We do get intimations about him in Ames discerning observation about him in 'Gilead".  Here is one of them by Ames "He doesn’t listen to the meaning of words, the way other people do. He just decides whether they are hostile, and how hostile they are. He decides whether they threaten him or injure him, and he reacts at that level. If he reads chastisement into anything you say, it’s as if you had taken a shot at him. As if you had nicked his ear" , or his demeanor which is deemed preacherly even when a child. As an aside for the curious about what is considered preacherly, this is Ames definition "There’s a way of being formal and deferential and at the same time cordial, while maintaining an air of dignified authority". But there are also more parlous aspects to Jack, especially as a member of a devout family whose preacher father is revered by the faithful. As Jack confesses "When I was small I thought the Lord was someone who lived in the attic and paid for the groceries. That was the last form of religious conviction I have been capable of. I mean, that I could never believe a word my poor old father said. Even as a child."

        The story begins with middle aged Glory returning back to her childhood home whose sole inhabitant is her elderly and widowed father Robert Boughton. Just like all the other Boughton children, Glory had left forlorn Gilead for brighter pastures in America's mid western cities, working as a school teacher. Her career and hopes for a future family are dashed when the fiancé to whom she had been engaged for over a decade is revealed as an already-married conman who has swindled her of all her money. Distraught she returns back to her family home deeply aware of her abject failure in life. The arrival of Jack after twenty years - into this environment, that pervades with the weight of passing years and a persistent, lingering sadness triggers a mood of reflection, introspection and regret. It is the conversations that happen between Jack and Glory and to a lesser extent Boughton which form the heart of this book.

        When they were children, Glory once asked Jack, “What right do you have to be so strange?” The question came after he suddenly vanished in the middle of a game they were playing. Years later, that half-uttered, unanswered question would perfectly capture the family’s ongoing exasperation with Jack.