Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

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.

MARILYNNE ROBINSON is the recipient of a 2012 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama, for her grace and intelligence in writing. In 2013 she was awarded South Korea's Park Kyong-ni Prize for her contribution to international literature. She is the author of Lila, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and a finalist for the National Book Award; Gilead, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Home, winner of the Orange Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and a finalist for the National Book Award. Her first novel, Housekeeping, won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. Robinson's non-fiction books include The Givenness of Things, When I Was a Child I Read Books, Absence of Mind, The Death of Adam, and Mother Country, which was nominated for a National Book Award. She lives in Iowa City, where she taught at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop for twenty-five years.