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  • Housekeeping (40th Anniversary Edition)

  • A Novel (Picador Modern Classics)
  • By: Marilynne Robinson
  • Narrated by: Thérèse Plummer
  • Length: 6 hrs and 24 mins
  • 4.7 out of 5 stars (6 ratings)

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Housekeeping (40th Anniversary Edition) cover art

Housekeeping (40th Anniversary Edition)

By: Marilynne Robinson
Narrated by: Thérèse Plummer
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Publisher's Summary

"[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

©1980 Marilynne Robinson (P)2020 Macmillan Audio
Family Life
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Critic Reviews

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

"These tiny little titles are pocket-sized, shiny, and gorgeous. Featuring authors like Marilynne Robinson and Jeffery Eugenides, they're the kind of books you'll have to own the entire set of, because they're just that pretty - and it happens to be lovely that they fit in just about every bag you own. You can't be caught anywhere without a book, of course." (Julia Seales, Bustle)

"Our books today are the neatest little things you’ll see in the rest of 2015’s book-year: a set of Modern Classics from Picador Press, done up in a neat bow!" (Open Letters Monthly)

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Profile Image for RUTH

Amazing story

Written 40 years ago but so relatable for today. Great imagery and characters. Simple plot but full of emotional resonance.

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