How can a man whose fundamental urge is to break, hurt, or damage relationships around him, through small actions as well as not acting when he should, gather together the internal resources needed to love? And how does such an urge come about, if not through early deprivation or injury? Klein might suggest that an innate excess of envy is implicated, whilst giving us hope that the working through into gratitude will lead to the capacity to love and to accept love; Marilynne Robinson gives us a more difficult path to travel: predestination and the struggle for grace.

Robinson is the Pulitzer prize-winning author of four other novels, three of which are concerned with the lives of two ministers' families in a fictional town in Iowa: Gilead, Home, and Lila. Her first novel, published to acclaim some