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Housekeeping

A Novel

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Housekeeping

By: Marilynne Robinson
Narrated by: Becket Royce
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£5.99/mo after 3 months. Offer ends on 5 July 2026 at 11:59 BST. Cancel monthly.

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An unabridged audio edition of Marilynne Robinson's classic work Housekeeping, on the 25th anniversary of its first publication.

Winner of the Pen/Hemingway Award

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 transcience.

 Family Life Genre Fiction Literary Fiction World Literature
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Critic reviews

“So precise, so distilled, so beautiful that one doesn't want to miss any pleasure it might yield.” —Le Anne Schreiber, The New York Times Book Review

“Here's a first novel that sounds as if the author has been treasuring it up all her life...You can feel in the book a gathering voluptuous release of confidence, a delighted surprise at the unexpected capacities of language, a close, careful fondness for people that we thought only saints felt.” —Anatole Broyard, The New York Times

“I found myself reading slowly, than more slowly—this is not a novel to be hurried through, for every sentence is a delight.” —Doris Lessing
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Struggled to make it to the end. It wasn't particularly gripping or interesting. Certainly not something I'd read again.

Dull

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This is the closest I have come to understanding another consciousness. This book was mesmerising.

The best book I have ever read

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I was put off this book by some the reviews who didn't like the narrator. For me the narration was perfect giving a clear view of this wonderful text.

Great book well read

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Very beautifully written and narrated. I listened at 0.9x speed though as the narrator was quite fast and I saw some people complain about it. To me this speed was the best and allowed me to focus both on the story and the voice that has brought it to me. I do think that apart from the speed thing the narrator is very suitable.

Epically poetic, listen at 0.9x speed

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Good story and read at your own pace very satisfying but the narrator goes way too fast and you can't quite take it in.

Great book but not a good listening experience

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