American author Marilynne Robinson has written just three novels, but each so intricately crafted that she has already gathered up most major awards, including the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award in 1980 for Housekeeping, the Pulitzer in 2005 for Gilead, and now in 2009 the Orange Prize for Home.

What all three novels share is a deliberately confined canvas: small-town 1950s America, the suffocating constrictions of domestic duty and orderliness juxtaposed with huge issues raging in the outside world. The title refers to two siblings returning ‘home’ for the impending death of their father, a Presbyterian minister, whilst the narrative concentrates on developing the raw and painful relationships between these three family members.

The sister and brother appear to represent opposite poles of ‘righteous’ and ‘wayward’, with Glory cutting short a respected career in teaching to come home and care for her father, while Jack’s life-history has been more related to alcohol and theft. Their father holds court from his sickbed, still passing judgments and thus reinforcing these long-held perceptions of character.

But what we actually see is two siblings both caring in their different ways, devoting the remaining days of their father’s life to washing, feeding and carrying him up to bed. We also discover a different version of their past lives. Jack was actually in a devoted marriage for ten years which he is desperately trying to restore, whereas Glory admits to a dead-end engagement which has left her aggrieved and frustrated. So rather than twin stereotypes of good and evil, the characters are revealed as more equally troubled, touchingly rediscovering the pleasure of each other’s company, and searching for a possibility of redemption before the imminent death.

The novel is a powerful demonstration of all those forces that frustrate our personal progression. It touches on our capacity to achieve a state of grace: the stultification of ‘home’, repeatedly reviving the folk memory of our childhood behaviour, so that no one can move on; the stranglehold of religion, which professes to pardon previous transgressions but never manages to overcome its sense of disapproval; and the tyranny of the 1950s, when social attitudes refused any deviation from accepted conventions.

The plot may proceed as slowly as the pace of change in their home village, but the themes explored become ever bigger: the failure of communication between family members, when nothing is asked or explained between the three of them despite years of familiarity; the unspoken topic of race, boiling in the urban riots of that fateful year, but not admitted as a subject for the dinner table; and the tragic decline that is death, that ultimate time limit by which reputations must be recovered or else forever sealed.

Home is a magnificent achievement because of the quiet and restrained manner in which it raises such massive issues as life, death and the tentative possibility of redemption.