Housekeeping by Marilyn Robinson

"I have observed that, in the way people are strange, they grow stranger," says Ruth, the narrator of Housekeeping. When she was young, her mother returned with her and her sister to Fingerbone, Idaho. Once there, she left the two of them on the front porch of her mother's house, then committed suicide by driving her car into a nearby lake. Ruth and sister Lucille are taken care of by the grandmother, two strange biddies named Lily and Nona, and finally by their Aunt Sylvie. (Ralphmag.org)

Housekeeping is a work of purest poetry, even though it pretends to be prose: "It was the wind, Alma said. The wind was as rank as a hunger and never the same twice."

At night it retreated into the mountains where the creatures prowl and whelp, and before day it came down again, smelling of blood.

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