God has never been so attractive as he is in Robinson’s depiction, but her heart is with the human experience, in all its forms. You don’t need an ounce of faith to be stunned and moved by Lila. Slowly, she allows herself to love and be loved. She doesn’t preach – in Ames she has created the most mild and questioning of believers – but simply shows us Lila’s cautious, partial softening. There is always a larger question gnawing away in Robinson’s books, and here it is the one Lila puts to Ames when they first talk: “I just been wondering lately why things happen the way they do.” Robinson spends the rest of the book trying to answer. Before Lila meets Ames, the Lord hasn’t figured in her life: “If there was a Good Lord Doll had never mentioned him.” Now Lila discovers that all she has known and loved – Doll – is damned: unbaptised and so hell-bound. In Lila, Robinson has created perhaps the fiercest test of Ames’s faith, and therefore her own, the Christian belief that forms and infuses all the Gilead books. We inhabit, indirectly, Lila’s mind as it leaps from her present discomfort as the preacher’s pregnant wife to raw memories of her shambolic childhood. Robinson doesn’t tell it like this, in a straight line.

“Doll said, ‘Well I spose they had to call it something.’”Eventually they parted, and Lila, after miserable years alone, found her way by chance to Gilead and an unlikely husband.

They worked in the fields and slept beneath the stars and for a year, Doll managed to put Lila through school, so she could learn to read and discover the name of her country, the United States of America.

She was rescued as a neglected child by Doll, an old woman who cared for her and took her on the road with an itinerant gang. Lila is the furious outsider, a woman whose hard life “is just written all over her face”, whose face isn’t pretty, however much they once tried to polish her up in a St Louis whorehouse.

Lila marilynne robinson