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Housekeeping

A Novel

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Housekeeping

By: Marilynne Robinson
Narrated by: Becket Royce
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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.

 Family Life Genre Fiction Literary Fiction World Literature
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Critic Reviews

“So precise, so distilled, so beautiful that one doesn't want to miss any pleasure it might yield.” —Le Anne Schreiber, 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
All stars
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Kept me interested, a bit weird, quite verbose, but a good book. Not believable though.

Good book. Almost too Descriptive

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I had heard quite a bit about this book over the years, but never managed to read it. I’m glad I waited: it’s a real treat.

Beautiful unusual story lovingly told

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Like a prism, the prose shimmers and splits open life and light. Ruthie's voice leads us through childhood and into a life of transience, ethereal, ephemeral, longing, lost, adrift... But all the while harbouring profound observation and experience. A richness familiar and comforting. This is in interior journey and a metaphor for our collective experience. Im tripping over myself with such high esteem for Marilynne Robinson.

Exquisite

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In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.