Lila

Robinson's second novel, Gilead, took the form of a letter written by an elderly preacher to his young son, the fruit of a late and utterly unexpected marriage to a much younger woman named Lila, and now Lila's story has become her fourth novel. (The novel in between, Home, concerned a character mentioned slightly in both books.) Lila's drama comes both from her hard history of drifting and deprivation and from her sudden finding of a home; those who have loved Gilead and Home will already be familiar with the way these books move quietly and insistently through pain toward grace, while those who loved her first novel, Housekeeping, will hear its echoes too in the pull of transience that beckons to Lila even in the comfort of her unlikely new family.