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.  

        Since Glory is the narrator through which we have a peek at the events, we get to see her inner world. Here is one such description of her life alone in a city "During the years she lived alone she had read the Bible morning and evening with the thought that her father would be pleased if he knew, and also to remember who she was, to remember the household she came from, to induce in herself the unspecific memory of a comfort she had not really been conscious of until she left it behind". This is another excerpt where middle aged Glory describes her feelings of being back in her childhood home, a passage that made tears well up in my eyes."Her father told his children to pray for patience, for courage, for kindness, for clarity, for trust, for gratitude. Those prayers will be answered, he said. Others may not be. So she prayed, Lord, give me patience..... I am miserable and bitter at heart, and old fears are rising up in me so that everything I do makes everything worse. But it cost her tears to think her situation might actually be that desolate, so she prayed again for patience, for tact, for understanding - for every virtue that might keep her safe from conflicts that would be sure to leave her wounded, every virtue that might at least help her preserve an appearance of dignity, for heaven’s sake."

        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. Yet it is the unremarkable, ne'er-do-well Jack, the family's black sheep, whose youth was marred by petty crime - who becomes the center of the entire family's attention and love. In the thoughts of Glory "It was the sad privilege of blood relations to love him despite all". The most powerful moments in the book are the conversations between Jack and Glory, in which the timid, deeply avoidant Jack—slowly, and for the first time in his life—opens up about his lifelong sense of not fitting in, the sense of estrangement that has haunted him since childhood. 

        The rest of the story is about the attempts to a troubled rapprochement that Jack attempts with his dying father and his decision again to leave Gilead to make up with his lady love Daisy. While the book includes lengthy theological discussions that may not appeal to every ordinary reader, it also achieves profound depth through its sensitive exploration of complex characters within a richly moral Christian framework. I enjoyed reading this.