About the Book

Winner of the Pen/Hemingway Award
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, 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.

Product Details

Media: Hardcover Book, 219 pages

Language: English

Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux (Oct. 31st, 2005)

ISBN-10: 0374173133

ISBN-13: 9780374173135

Dimensions: 6.36 x 8.84 x 0.83 inches

Shipping Weight: 0.82 lbs

• Categories: General Fiction and Literature