By Marilynn Robinson Farrar, Straus and Giroux $25 » 336 pp

When Marilynne Robinson won the Pulitzer Prize for her deeply spiritual novel, 2004's "Gilead," it was a pleasure and a vindication for readers who had championed "Housekeeping" as one of the best novels of the 20th century.

Now Robinson has written "Home," which tells the story of "Gilead" in a different voice.

First, a word about "Gilead": It was written as the testament of John Ames, a small-town Iowa preacher, in the form of a letter to his 6-year-old son, to be read after Ames was gone and his son grown. Ames wrote of his love of and estrangement from family members, of a lifetime of pondering the nature of God and of the return to Gilead of a man who had been a trial and a tribulation to him - Jack Boughton. It was, and is, an incandescent, moving work.

"Home" revisits this time and place, but from the perspective of Jack Boughton and his sister Glory, a 38-year-old woman in the wake of a failed romance, who has come home to take care of her dying father, the Rev. Boughton, Ames' best friend. Jack has returned after two decades of silence and separation from his family.

It's 1956. Gilead has an eerily timeless feel. Kids are innocent, the hope of a seemingly unclouded future. The furniture in the Boughtons' stuffed Victorian parlor sits in judgment of the modern age; it's so quiet one almost longs for a phone to ring.

For the dying Rev. Boughton, marooned in his lifelong home, the present continuously bleeds into the past. His biggest failure is Jack, and one of Jack's biggest regrets is the pain he has caused his father. When Jack returns, father and son commence an excruciating attempt to reconcile - on the doorstep of death.

Few other characters intrude, creating a sense of compression and emotional claustrophobia heightened by the fact that this is a preacher's family, and the issue of What Will Everyone Think is never far from the front porch.

"Home" will not be a novel for everyone. If you were raised, as I was, in an old-line Protestant environment where judgment is the knife-edge of the kindly gesture, and reconciliation means "bend to the Lord's will," this book will resonate with you for weeks after you've finished it. If you weren't, you may well wonder: Why do these people keep tormenting themselves, measuring every thought, word and deed against 500 years of Protestant/Calvinist doctrine?

Robinson is a practicing Congregationalist mightily concerned with issues of spirituality, philosophy and religion. My take on "Home" is that it is her meditation on the difficulty of bringing together two key tenets of Christianity - the imperative to judge and the need to forgive.