An illuminating meditation on faith and America's fate

When I Was a Child I Read Books by Marilynne Robinson

**Virago, €21.70**

**Reviewed by Joanne Hayden**

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Their tones may differ, but Marilynne Robinson's essays and novels have similar themes and concerns. As a novelist, Robinson's strengths lie in her small town canvases, her organic, often devastating, character studies and her stunningly crafted sentences. As a polemicist, she is dauntingly erudite, her arguments informed by decades of scholarship, ...