Housekeeping

Ruth and her younger sister Lucille are raised in an unsteady household that passes them from one caregiver to the next. First their capable grandmother looks after them, then two clumsy great-aunts, and at last Sylvie, their mother's odd and withdrawn sister, takes over.

The girls live in Fingerbone, a small town beside a glacial lake in the Far West. Their grandfather died in a dramatic train accident on that lake, and their mother died after her car plunged off a cliff nearby. The harsh landscape and erratic weather of the place seem to press on its residents, who are also haunted by the sense that the great events of history happened somewhere else. The novel follows the sisters as they move toward adulthood while living with grief, endurance, and the pull of impermanence.

The book has been named to several lists of the best novels, including those of Time and The Guardian, and it earned a PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award in 1982. It was also a Pulitzer Prize nominee for fiction, a PEN/Faulkner Award nominee, and a National Book Award finalist in paperback.

Housekeeping, published in 1980, is the first novel by Marilynne Robinson, who later wrote Gilead.