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Housekeeping

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About this listen

 A modern classic, 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, their eccentric and remote aunt. The family house is in the small Far West town of Fingerbone, set on a glacial lake, 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.©1980 Marilynne Robinson; (P)2005 Audio Renaissance, a division of Holtzbrinck Publishers, LLC Family Life Genre Fiction Literary Fiction World Literature

Critic reviews

"So precise, so distilled, so beautiful that one doesn't want to miss any pleasure it might yield." (The New York Times Book Review)
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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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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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