u003cpu003eu003cbu003eWinner of the Pen/Hemingway Awardu003c/bu003eu003cbru003eu003cbru003eu003cbu003eA modern classic, Marilynne Robinson's u003ciu003eHousekeepingu003c/iu003e 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. u003c/bu003eu003cbru003eu003cbru003eThe 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." u003cbru003eu003cbru003eRuth and Lucille's struggle toward adulthood beautifully illuminates the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transcience.u003c/pu003e
