Housekeeping Reading Order

Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping (1980) is her debut novel — one of the most celebrated debut novels in American literary history — set in the fictional town of Fingerbone, Idaho, on a lake where a train once fell through the ice. Ruth and Lucille, orphaned sisters, are raised by a succession of relatives until their eccentric Aunt Sylvie arrives, and the novel becomes a meditation on transience, domesticity, loss, and the difference between those who root themselves in the world and those who, like Sylvie, remain perpetually drifting. Robinson won the Pulitzer Prize for Gilead (2004), her second novel.