num_pages: 219
description: A 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, their eccentric and remote aunt. The family house is in the small Far West town of Fingerbone set on a glacial lake, 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.
language: English
title: Housekeeping
titlecomplete: Housekeeping
genres: Fiction, Family, American, Coming Of Age, Literature, Classics, Novels, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Audiobook
ratings_count: 51797
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: Bantam Books