Housekeeping: A Novel

by Marilynne Robinson Narrated by Becket Royce

Overview

An unabridged audio edition of Marilynne Robinson's classic work Housekeeping, on the 25th anniversary of its first publication.

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.

Editorial Reviews

Charles McGrath

....The language is so precise, so distilled and so beautiful one does not want to miss any pleasure it might yield up to patience. -- The New York Times Books of the Century

Hamill

An often comic novel that has become a certifiable classic. Her name is Ruth and she has the eye and ear of a poet.
—Hungry Mind Review

From the Publisher

So precise, so distilled, so beautiful that one doesn't want to miss any pleasure it might yield.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Here's a first novel that sounds as if the author has been treasuring it up all her life...You can feel in the book a gathering voluptuous release of confidence, a delighted surprise at the unexpected capacities of language, a close, careful fondness for people that we thought only saints felt.” —Anatole Broyard, The New York Times

“I found myself reading slowly, than more slowly—this is not a novel to be hurried through, for every sentence is a delight.” —Doris Lessing

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169078985
Publisher:	Macmillan Audio
Publication date:	08/01/2005
Edition description:	Unabridged

Videos