Recommendations
Books Like Housekeeping
Best books to read after Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping is her debut — one of the most celebrated debut novels in American literary history, set in an Idaho town where two orphaned sisters are raised by their drifting Aunt Sylvie. These recommendations continue the Robinson canon, explore the American women's literary tradition, or offer companion reading in the tradition of the lyric American novel about transience, solitude, and what it means to be rooted or free.
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Gilead
by Marilynne Robinson
The Pulitzer Prize-winning Robinson companion — John Ames's letter to his young son in a small Iowa town in 1956; thematically related to Housekeeping through Robinson's characteristic meditative prose and her attention to the ordinary sacred, in a very different emotional register.
- 2Buy
The Virgin Suicides
by Jeffrey Eugenides
The suburban American gothic companion — the five Lisbon sisters in a Michigan suburb in the 1970s, narrated by a chorus of neighborhood boys decades later; shares Housekeeping's interest in women's desire for escape and the violence that comes to those who cannot be contained by domesticity.
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Beloved
by Toni Morrison
The great American novel of women haunted by the past — Sethe and the ghost of her daughter in post-Civil War Ohio; Morrison's most celebrated novel sharing Housekeeping's interest in the specific ways that women inherit and are destroyed by historical violence.
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A Thousand Acres
by Jane Smiley
The Pulitzer Prize companion in women and land — a King Lear retelling on an Iowa farm, Smiley's novel about three sisters and what their father has done to them; shares Housekeeping's interest in the women who inherit the consequences of what men have built.
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Wise Blood
by Flannery O'Connor
The American Southern gothic companion — Hazel Motes and the Church Without Christ; O'Connor's grotesque and comic debut novel sharing Housekeeping's Northwestern gothic atmosphere and its interest in characters who resist the ordinary obligations of settled life.
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Bastard Out of Carolina
by Dorothy Allison
The American working-class women's novel companion — Ruth Anne 'Bone' Boatwright growing up in South Carolina, Allison's National Book Award finalist sharing Housekeeping's interest in poverty, transience, and the specific experience of girls who grow up in places where they are not protected.
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The Hours
by Michael Cunningham
The formal companion in women's interiority — three women across different decades, Cunningham's novel sharing Housekeeping's interest in what it costs to be a woman who thinks too much and feels too much for the domesticity that is offered to her.
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Anywhere But Here
by Mona Simpson
The mother-daughter road novel companion — Ann August and her mother Adele driving from Wisconsin to Beverly Hills, Simpson's debut novel sharing Housekeeping's interest in the damage done by a mother who refuses to be ordinary and the daughter who must manage the consequences.
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