Housekeeping is a not-so-warm winter read

💡 When the air turns chillier and the skies grow cloudier, the bookworms among us often seek warmth in heartwarming, cozy reads — or otherwise in a true winter novel like Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping. The 1980 Pulitzer finalist weaves intricate prose and a poetic heaviness, transforming a seeming coming-of-age tale of two sisters into an urgent exploration of survival and loss in the relentlessly cold and isolated town of Fingerbone.

Within the walls of Housekeeping, Robinson writes the pain and beauty of parenthood and childhood, setting them against — and alongside — the vastness of nature. Robinson projects emotional landscapes onto physical ones — plants, trees, birds, and environmental forces.

“Their lives spun off the tilting world like thread off a spindle.” Robinson’s lyricism and the pastoral language saw the New York Times describe the novel as one that “reads as slowly as poetry… The language is so precise, so distilled, so beautiful that one doesn’t want to miss any pleasure it might yield up to patience.” Housekeeping feels grounded, but quietly magical and immersive.

Housekeeping was awarded the PEN/Hemingway Award for best first novel when it debuted, also making the top 100 in the Guardian list of the greatest novels of all time that year, and Time’s 100 best English-language novels published since 1923. The success of Robinson’s first novel, as well as her later works, is a testament to her quiet but unyielding understanding of the human condition.

WHERE TO FIND IT- You can read Housekeeping as an eBook on Amazon and Kobo.