Housekeeping
A Novel
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Marilynne Robinson became an overnight literary star when her second novel, Gilead, won the Pulitzer in 2005. But her cult following began a quarter century earlier with this brief, luminous novel about finding your place in the world. After their mother’s suicide, teenage siblings Ruth and Lucille get shuttled from one set of relatives to another in the tiny mountain town of Fingerbone, Idaho—until their mother’s free-spirited sister, Sylvie, comes home and takes charge. The sisters’ very different responses to Sylvie’s eccentricities—from sleeping in her clothes to wandering off to spend days in the nearby forest—threaten to fray their once-unbreakable bond. Robinson’s vivid and expressive language brings you right into her heroines’ peculiar world, a place that director Bill Forsyth (Local Hero) captured beautifully in his 1987 film starring Christine Lahti as Sylvie. Sweet, sad, funny, and absolutely magical, Housekeeping is a transcendent joy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A reissue of the contemporary feminist classic.
