"[Narrator Therese] Plummer's talented performance is both illuminating and poignant." -- AudioFile Magazine
Winner of the Pen/Hemingway Award
Fortieth Anniversary Edition
This program includes a bonus conversation with the author.
A modern classic, Marilynne Robinson's 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 transience.
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Download and start listening now!
""These tiny little titles are pocket-sized, shiny, and gorgeous. Featuring authors like Marilynne Robinson and Jeffery Eugenides, they're the kind of books you'll have to own the entire set of, because they're just that pretty — and it happens to be lovely that they fit in just about every bag you own. You can't be caught anywhere without a book, of course."
— Julia Seales, Bustle
“Robinson infuses the tale with offbeat humor, but the enduring impact of this book lies in its pervasive understanding of tragedy.”
— People“Robinson literally seems to stretch her characters with insight she must have stockpiled for years.”
— Ms. magazine“Robinson’s ability to show us the power of unconventional love and the lasting, although invisible, bonds between members of such an eccentric and apparently feckless family makes us smile with pleasure throughout the novel.”
— Washington Post“So precise, so distilled, so beautiful that one doesn't want to miss any pleasure it might yield.
— The New York Times Book ReviewOur books today are the neatest little things you’ll see in the rest of 2015’s book-year: a set of Modern Classics from Picador Press, done up in a neat bow!
— Open Letters MonthlyBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Marilynne Robinson is the author of numerous books, including Gilead, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Home, winner of the Orange Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Lila, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Jack, a New York Times bestseller. Her first novel, Housekeeping, won the PEN/Hemingway Award. She is the recipient of a 2012 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama, for “her grace and intelligence in writing.”
Thérèse Plummer is an actor, award-winning voice-over artist, and counselor. She has won eighteen AudioFile Earphones Awards and has been a finalist for the prestigious Audie Award for best narration. She has appeared in a variety of television and film roles. As a counselor for adolescents, she spent five years using drama therapy techniques in individual and group settings.