In an interview a few years ago, Marilynne Robinson described how once she’d finished writing a novel, she missed the characters: “I feel sort of bereaved”. That’s why she keeps returning to them. We first met her elderly, “silvery” preacher, John Ames, in Gilead (2004),...

There are, I think you'd agree, lots of beautiful books: books that are beautiful because of the ideas they carry, the passion they evoke, the imagination they set free; and then there are books (sometimes the same ones) that are beautiful because they are fine to...