Housekeeping (Fortieth Anniversary Edition)
“Robinson infuses the tale with offbeat humor, but the enduring impact of this book lies in its pervasive understanding of tragedy.”
People
A New York Public Library Staff Pick of Favorite Books of the last 125 Years
Winner of the PEN/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award
One of Time Magazine's Best 100 English-Language Novels from 1923–2005
A PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist
Among shortlisted titles for Pulitzer Prize - Finalist, 1982
Nominated for Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award - Nominee, 1982
Among shortlisted titles for Pulitzer Prize - Finalist, 1982
Nominated for Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award - Nominee, 1982
Among shortlisted titles for Pulitzer Prize - Finalist, 1982
Nominated for Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award - Nominee, 1982
"[Narrator Therese] Plummer's talented performance is both illuminating and poignant." -- AudioFile Magazine
Winner of the Pen/Hemingway Award
Fortieth Anniversary Edition
This program includes a bonus conversation with the author.
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 transience.
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Praise