Housekeeping (Fortieth Anniversary Edition): A Novel [Paperback]

In the plain-spokenness of its language, the grace and dignity of its characters, the simplicity of its story and its intimations of spiritual transcendence,Housekeepingis a book that transformed how I see my place in the world. - David Marchese,The New York TimesMagazine

Winner of the Pen/Hemingway Award

A modern classic, Marilynne Robinson'sHousekeepingis 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 Robinsonis the recipient of a 2012 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama, for her grace and intelligence in writing. She is the author ofGilead, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award;Home, winner of the Orange Prize and theLos Angeles TimesBook Prize; andLila, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her first novel,Housekeeping, won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. Robinson's nonfiction books includeThe Givenness of Things,When I Was a Child I Read Books,Absence of Mind, The Death of Adam, andMother Country. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.

So precise, so distilled, so beautiful that one doesn't want to misslCz