Housekeeping

Written by Marilynne Robinson

Two orphaned sisters are raised by a drifting aunt in a remote lakeside town.

3.8 Goodreads · 60,993 ratings

224 pages

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Bookroo's summary

Ruth and her younger sister Lucille grow up in Fingerbone, a small town beside a glacial lake in the Far West, passed from their grandmother to two fussy great-aunts and finally to their mother's sister, Sylvie, a restless drifter. As Sylvie's unconventional housekeeping lets the house slide into disorder, Lucille longs for an ordinary life while Ruth is drawn toward her aunt's solitary, wandering ways, and the sisters' bond is tested.

From the publisher

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.

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