This remarkable novel is the fourth in the compelling Robinson sequence, which began with Gilead in 2004 and continued with Home (2008) and Lila (2014).
Gilead won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2005 and Robinson has been awarded countless times. In 2015 she was interviewed in the New York Review of Books by one of her most notable admirers, President Barack Obama.
Gilead introduced readers to a Midwestern, mid-century American world in which questions of family and faith are deeply intertwined.
That novel takes the form of a narrative written by John Ames, a Congregationalist minister. We are introduced to his wider family and that of his lifelong friend, the Rev. Houghton, whose son is the black sheep of the family.
Jack's absence haunts his father's life while his rare presence disturbs it no end. At the end of Gilead the reader learns that Jack's own life is haunted by his long relationship with Della Miles, a black woman.
This is the US in the mid-1950s when such relationships were not merely frowned upon but were actually illegal and would remain so in many states until 1967.
The grieved-over prodigal son, a drunkard and a ne'er-do-well has left home for St Louis, Missouri. In that segregated city, Jack falls in love with an African-American high school teacher, also a preacher's child. Della Miles is a woman with a discriminating mind, a generous spirit and an independent will.
The Second World War is over, but men in uniform can still be seen, and we overhear the lyrics to "I wish I didn't love you so" written by Frank Loesser and released in 1947.
This couple have quite different characters. Jack is a ne'er-do-well, a man who has been in prison for a crime he may or may not have committed. He works at a shoe store and in a dance hall and lives in a boarding house. He is the son of a minister but respectability seems to elude him.
Della, on the contrary, lives up to what would be expected from the daughter of a bishop of her church. But time and again she seeks Jack, despite her family's misgivings.
It is striking to be reading this novel during the time of a global pandemic and the protests of the Black Lives Matter movement. Jack and Della advance towards their love and retreat from it at the same time. The narrative pull of Robinson's timeless prose becomes part and parcel of their troubled dance.
Although the book fits beautifully into the subtle weave of Robinson's Gilead books, this novel can perfectly well be read on its own.
It is a meditation on faith: not only faith in God but also the faith human beings can place in each other, faith that will stand no matter what. Faith that the world might improve and be redeemed.