Marilynne Robinson’s exquisite, peerless novels are about nothing and everything. There is no one quite like this American writer, or quite as good as her. The setting of her latest, Lila, is once again the nondescript mid-American, Iowan town of Gilead, which provided the title for her 2005 Pulitzer Prize-winner, and the backdrop to her 2009 Orange Prize-winner, Home. Those who, like me, have re-read them countless times, finding more and more nourishment, will be enraptured by Lila. As well as reprising some of the same characters, notably the two elderly Protestant clergymen Ames and Broughton, forever struggling to match theology, Scripture and real life, it also sees Robinson once more exploring what she has made her very own territory – the best of religion, a million mi