Home (Oprah's Book Club): A Novel

In fact, lying in that family almost always meant only that the liar would appreciate discretion. So the transparency of a falsehood was very much to the point. She had cordoned off her own embarrassments from inquiry by means of a few explanations that were false on their face and never tested or returned to for that reason. As a matter of courtes

If you forgive, he would say, you may indeed still not understand, but you will be ready to understand, and that is the posture of grace.

The letters were so precious to her, and what were they? They were bland and prosaic, three readings out of four. But when they touched her, she was suffused with joy. There was no other word for it. She knew that if she had kept them, she would still look at them to see if there was anything in them to account for the sweet power they had had for

“Survival on terms I could convince myself were tolerable. That was the pinnacle of my aspirations. I did not anticipate failure. I have awakened in the occasional gutter from time to time—figuratively speaking, of course—and I have thought to myself, Just a little effort would improve my situation dramatically. So there was that optimism. It may h

Fealty to kin, actual and imagined, and the protection of them, possible or not, were their father’s pride, his strongest instinct, and his chief source of satisfaction, frustration, and anxiety.

Experience had taught them that truth had sharp edges and hard corners, and could be seriously at odds with kindness.

Maybe great sorrow or guilt is simply to be accepted as absolute, like revelation. My iniquity/punishment is greater than I can bear. In the Hebrew, her father said, that one word had two meanings and we chose one of them, which may make it harder for us to understand why the Lord would have pardoned Cain and protected him, and let him go on with h

She was good in the fullest and narrowest sense of the word as it is applied to female children. And she had blossomed into exactly the sort of adult her childhood predicted. Ah well.

Twenty years was long enough to make a stranger of someone she had known far better than this brother of hers, and here he was in her kitchen, pale and ill at ease and in no state to receive the kindness prepared for him, awaiting him, even then wilting and congealing into the worst he could have meant by the word “lunch.” And what an ugly word tha