Housekeeping (Anniversay)

“These pocket-sized titles are stunning….They make the perfect stocking stuffers!” – Metro

“Bought together or separately, these fiction titles are ideal stocking stuffers for the literature lover.” – USA Today

Newly reissued as a Picador Modern Classic, Marilynne Robinson’s brilliant, PEN/Hemingway Award-winning first novel

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.

For more than twenty years, Picador has been producing beautifully packaged literary fiction and nonfiction books from Manhattan’s Flatiron Building. Our Twentieth Anniversary Modern Classics line pairs iconic books – The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides, Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse, Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson, and Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson – with a design that’s both small enough to fit in your pocket and unique enough to stand out on your bookshelf.