Robinson writes calamity so beautifully you might miss the train wrecks, floods, and fires for all your satisfied sighs.
— Landon
Reading Marilynne Robinson is like skipping stones: scouring the shore for a small, flat rock; casting it away with a flick of the wrist; mourning the loss of that weight in your hand; listening for the satisfying plip-plop-plips; watching the concentric circles of light and water expand and merge and disappear back into the smooth reflective surface. If a stone skips and no one saw, did the water ripple? (Yes.)
— Bekah
Reading Marilynne Robinson is like skipping stones: scouring the shore for a small, flat rock; casting it away with a flick of the wrist; mourning the loss of that weight in your hand; listening for the satisfying plip-plop-plips; watching the concentric circles of light and water expand and merge and disappear back into the smooth reflective surface. If a stone skips and no one saw, did the water ripple? (Yes.)
— Bekah
With a love of Melville and the 19th-century that seeps into every page, this is a gift in the form of a novel. Complete with prose that genuinely shocks –– in Fingerlake, one does not die, but “eschews waking” –– Housekeeping is so hypnotic and inexplicable you’re never quite sure whether you’re asleep or awake, underwater or ashore.
— FrankiWinner 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.
“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