Housekeeping

By Marilynne Robinson

Categories: Literature & Fiction

Marilynne Robinson's 1980 debut novel is narrated by Ruth, who with her younger sister Lucille grows up in Fingerbone, a remote town on a glacial lake in Idaho. After their mother's death, the girls are cared for by a succession of relatives and finally by their aunt Sylvie, a transient with unconventional ideas about keeping house. As Lucille longs for an ordinary life and Ruth drifts toward Sylvie's ways, the novel explores loss, family and the pull between belonging and impermanence.

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• Barack Obama: “I struck up a friendship with [the novelist] Marilynne Robinson, who has become a good friend. And we've become sort of pen pals. I started reading her in Iowa, where "Gilead" and some of her best novels are set. And I loved her writing in part because I saw those people every day.”