October 15, 2008—The National Book Foundation announced today that Marilynne Robinson's third novel, Home, has been nominated for this year's National Book Award for fiction. The novel revisits the same town as Robinson's Pulitzer Prize–winning 2004 novel, Gilead. Home is the account of what happens when thirty-eight-year-old Glory Boughton returns to Gilead to care for her dying father and is joined by her brother, Jack, an alcoholic who has never managed to reconcile himself to his strict father.

In her BAM review of Gilead, Katherine A. Powers wrote: "A Christian man’s encounter with the implacable constraints of the human life span lies at the heart of Gilead, [which] succeeds as few novels do in giving narrative flesh to abstract theological investigations." Gilead was published twenty-four years after Robinson's first novel, Housekeeping, which was made into a popular 1987 movie starring Christine Lahti. Robinson has also written two books of nonfiction. 

In a 2004 New York Times Magazine profile (registration required), Robinson discussed her formative years at Pembroke College at Brown: "Robinson just 'squirreled herself away' (a beloved locution) and read. It was at Pembroke … that she learned to write. 'When I was a sophomore, somehow I took John Hawkes's class. I had a ferocious roommate; we were an unlikely pair' -- she laughed at the recollection. 'She said: "You don't have the nerve to take John Hawkes's class. You think you're a writer, but you would never dare." On that basis alone, I decided to take the class. He was famously difficult.'"

Robinson teaches at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. In September, Robinson discussed Home on National Public Radio's Weekend Edition.

The National Book Award winners will be announced in New York City on November 19.