Awards
Winner of the Pen/Hemingway Award
Synopses & Reviews
A modern classic, 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.
Review
"I found myself reading slowly, then more slowly — this is not a novel to be hurried through, for every sentence is a delight." Doris Lessing
Review
"So precise, so distilled, so beautiful that one doesn't want to miss any pleasure it might yield." Le Anne Schreiber, The New York Times Book Review
About the Author
Marilynne Robinson is also the author of Mother Country, an examination of Great Britain's role in the radioactive pollution of the world's environment. She teaches as the University of Iowa Writer's Program.