Housekeeping: A Novel

Marilynne Robinson

Nov 2004 · Sold by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

About this ebook

Winner of the Pen/Hemingway Award

A modern classic, Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, the eccentric and remote sister of their dead mother.

The family house is in the small town of Fingerbone on a glacial lake in the Far West, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It is a town "chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere."

Ruth and Lucille's struggle toward adulthood beautifully illuminates the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transcience.

Ratings and reviews

I had to read this book for my AP Lit class and honestly thought it the most boring, uninteresting, and dull attempt at writing that I've ever read. If I weren't being graded I would have given up after the first day. I have never given up hope on a book in my life.

I loved reading this book for it's poetic content. I also especially was drawn into the spiritual accounts as it draws events to death and rebirth. The transient lives of the girls are an exploration for the reader as we follow their lives and are amazed at life style and the poetic narration of Ruth. Peter Curtis

This novel, hauntingly beautiful and sad, has stayed with me for decades.

About the author

Marilynne Robinson is the recipient of a 2012 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama, for "her grace and intelligence in writing." She is the author of Gilead, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Home, winner of the Orange Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Lila, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her first novel, Housekeeping, won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. Robinson's nonfiction books include The Givenness of Things, When I Was a Child I Read Books, Absence of Mind, The Death of Adam, and Mother Country. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.