Housekeeping: A Novel (PEN/Hemingway Award) [B0566]

1981 PB with just minor wear. An award winning debut novel by the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel 'Gilead'. 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.

From recent Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "A lovely story with gorgeous prose. Just a stunning first novel. I can see now why it was such a big deal when Robinson returned to novels with Gilead 24 years after this one."; "Stunning, elegiac. Every sentence is perfect. The story laments the loneliness of being an oddball."; "This one was quite strange. There were times I thought the writing was unique and worthy of the modern classic description and there were also times I felt the prose was too convoluted and cumbersome for the plot and difficult to comprehend."; "This was an exquisitely written and beautifully atmospheric novel with an overall melancholy air, focusing on broken families and quiet tragedies. Its characters were so well-drawn and the writing truly was one of a kind. That along with the characters really stole the show for me. This is the definition of a "no plot, just vibes" book and I was here for it!"