num_pages: 224
description: Winner of the Pen/Hemingway AwardA modern classic, 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.
language: English
title: Housekeeping
titlecomplete: Housekeeping
genres: Family, Fiction, Classics, Contemporary, Coming Of Age, American, Literary Fiction, Audiobook, Literature, Novels
ratings_count: 51774
places: The United States of America
awards: awardedAt: 378720000000
name: Pulitzer Prize
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 378720000000
name: PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, awardedAt: 378720000000
name: Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, awardedAt: 410256000000
name: National Book Award Finalist
category: Fiction (Paperback), awardedAt: 378720000000
name: PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel
publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux