<\/p>\n
PRAISE FOR DUCKS, NEWBURYPORT<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cLucy Ellmann\u2019s Ducks, Newburyport<\/em> offers a radical literary form and voice. Dense to look at, challengingly epic, the novel is built around one Ohio housewife\u2019s monologue, flowing with dazzling lightness and speed. The detritus and maddening complexity of domesticity unfold in one breath, over a thousand pages. Shards of film plot and song collide with climate change anxiety; the terrors of parenting, healthcare and shopping lists wrestle with fake news and gun culture. The narrator reverberates with humour, wordplay and political rage. The writing resonates like a dissonant yet recognisable American symphony for massive forces, with riffs and themes folding back, proliferating, and gradually cohering. Its one long sentence occasionally breaks to simply describe a mountain lioness and her cubs: a meditation on nurture that will be wrapped into the violence of the ending. Lucy Ellmann has written a genre-defying novel, a torrent on modern life, as well as a hymn to loss and grief. Her creativity and sheer obduracy make demands on the reader. But Ellmann\u2019s daring is exhilarating \u2015 as are the wit, humanity and survival of her unforgettable narrator.\u201d \u2015Booker Prize Judge, Joanna MacGregor <\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cLucy Ellmann\u2019s Ducks, Newburyport<\/em> offers a radical literary form and voice. Dense to look at, challengingly epic, the novel is built around one Ohio housewife\u2019s monologue, flowing with dazzling lightness and speed. The detritus and maddening complexity of domesticity unfold in one breath, over a thousand pages. Shards of film plot and song collide with climate change anxiety; the terrors of parenting, healthcare and shopping lists wrestle with fake news and gun culture. The narrator reverberates with humour, wordplay and political rage. The writing resonates like a dissonant yet recognisable American symphony for massive forces, with riffs and themes folding back, proliferating, and gradually cohering. Its one long sentence occasionally breaks to simply describe a mountain lioness and her cubs: a meditation on nurture that will be wrapped into the violence of the ending. Lucy Ellmann has written a genre-defying novel, a torrent on modern life, as well as a hymn to loss and grief. Her creativity and sheer obduracy make demands on the reader. But Ellmann\u2019s daring is exhilarating\u2015as are the wit, humanity and survival of her unforgettable narrator.\u201d \u20152019 Booker Prize Jury Citation<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cThis book has its face pressed up against the pane of the present; its form mimics the way our minds move now toggling between tabs, between the needs of small children and aging parents, between news of ecological collapse and school shootings while somehow remembering to pay taxes and fold the laundry…The capaciousness of the book allows Ellmann to stretch and tell the story of one family on a canvas that stretches back to the bloody days of Western expansion, but its real value feels deeper \u2015 it demands the very attentiveness, the care, that it enshrines.\u201d\u2015Parul Sehgal,<\/strong> New York Times<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n “Brilliantly ambitious…At times there\u2019s such fury to these ruminations that the book seems to shift into direct cultural critique; at other times it all seems simply part of the story…The lioness offers a foil, a figure of natural instinct and maternal courage set against the narrator\u2019s culturally determined fears and insecurities…This is a novel, but it is also, fundamentally, a very long and meaningful list…as accumulative, as pointed, as death-addled, as joyous, as storied, as multitudinous and as large as life.” \u2015Martin Riker, New York Times Book Review<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cEllmann captures the pathos of the everyday, how one might use pie crusts and film synopses to dam in pain. She also allows the narrator\u2019s avoidance to suggest a greater amnesia, an American reluctance to face its past and its ongoing brutalities. The narrator lives in a country whose mythic propositions hang in the same limbo as her run-on sentence…Ellmann\u2019s commitment to compilation and description suggests a resistance to hierarchies. It also flickers with tenderness. The time and care that she lavishes on her narrator seem like their own form of political speculation\u2015that every individual is owed an unending devotion, and that such devotion, applied universally, might change the fate of the world.” \u2015New Yorker<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n “Effervescent…as the book closes in on the thrilling \u2015 and unexpected \u2015 conclusion, the disparate strands tossed out at the novel\u2019s onset gleam with import…Ducks, Newburyport directs us back to the language on the page, so we become hyper-aware of it…Ellmann has made a case that a richer, less regimented language leads to a more vibrant and capacious mind, and has thus crafted the entrancing Ducks, Newburyport into a celebration of all that words, and the minds they build, can contain.” \u2015<\/strong>Chicago Review of Books<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n “A sublime literary enactment of how guilt, grief, rage, regret, compassion, and every other emotion swirls and ebbs in unbalanced defiance of rational logic…The very form of Ducks, Newburyport is perhaps the ultimate expression of life\u2019s absurd disproportionality…The free-associative stream accumulates into a work of great formal beauty, whose distinctive linguistic rhythms and patterns envelop the reader like music or poetry. Equally, it forms a damning indictment on capitalist patriarchy that, in an extraordinary feat from a writer at the height of her powers, never veers within a mile of sanctimony or self-righteousness. If art is measured by how skillfully it holds a mirror up to society, then Ellmann has surely written the most important novel of this era. ” \u2015The Paris Review<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cBreathlessly brilliant \u2026 an extraordinary achievement of wit and imagination \u2026 this isn\u2019t just one of the outstanding books of 2019, it\u2019s one of the outstanding books of the century.\u201d \u2015The Irish Times<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cUlysses<\/em> has nothing on this \u2026 Once you get going, you\u2019ll be too absorbed to stop.\u201d \u2015Cosmopolitan<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cCould possibly turn out to be the most important novel of the decade \u2026 Read Ducks, Newburyport<\/em>. This is a novel for the idea of America today.\u201d \u2015Los Angeles Review of Books<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n “Eccentric and recursive, its language eschews modernism\u2019s tangled poetry for something more recognizably contemporary. The detritus of digital and popular culture is embedded, shard-like, in the mesh of the narrator\u2019s ever-unspooling mind…Her heroine\u2019s anger burns cleanly, refusing the easy conflagration of self-righteousness. The cumulative effect is devastating. This is a powerful and deeply felt indictment of American moral failure, a fearful, dazzling bloom of conscience…The narrative technique of Ducks, Newburyport is itself a kind of coping mechanism, a grand mimetic achievement. The novel\u2019s length is, in the end, something of the point.” \u2015The Nation<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n “There are novels, and then there are extraordinary novels\u2015truly unique, one-of-a-kind, sui generis\u2015terms that are often used as clich\u00e9s but I assure you not in Lucy Ellmann\u2019s case, regarding her eighth novel, Ducks, Newburyport…a truly great American novel that catches our zeitgeist more accurately during the Trump years than anything else I have read…Ellmann has crawled into the horrifying times in which we live and written an explosive story that will engage you on every one of its 1000 pages.” \u2015CounterPunch<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cIt’s a book that quite restores our faith in the possibility of literary ‘greatness’ while questioning what forms such ‘greatness’ can or should take. It is certainly, in its humane range and weight, a Great American Novel. Is it any good? Oh my word, yes. Reading it at this point in times seems like an act of human solidarity, a commitment to the world of truth and reason.\u201d \u2015Literary Review<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n “Brilliant \u2015 and addictive…There have been comparisons to James Joyce\u2019s Ulysses<\/em>, but Ellmann is in a class by herself.” \u2015Associated Press<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n “Readers need not scoff this giant pie in one gulp. Sampled at regular intervals, it tastes sweeter. The sheer ingenuity of Ms Ellmann\u2019s wordplay, the fabulous profusion of her recipes, catalogues and inventories, from a freezer\u2019s contents to confectionery brands, imbue every passage with fun as well as a sardonic poetry.” \u2015Economist<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Ducks, Newburyport <\/em>is a menacing novel, a masterpiece of precision and endurance. This is the sort of book you’ll pick up and be baffled for the first 10 or 20 pages, but by the 30th page, you’ll be home.” \u2015Thrillist<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n “Ducks<\/em> is a technical masterpiece and kind of literary manifesto…a staggeringly provocative work of genius.” \u2015Toronto Star<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n “Ducks, Newburyport is a complex book about a complicated time. It reads like an outpour of humanity beckoning to be heard.” \u2015Electric Literature<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cResplendent in ambition, humour and humanity \u2026 a lifetime of memories hoarded and pored over, like the family heirlooms the narrator and her husband have inherited along with all the joy and desolation contained within them \u2026 In Ducks, Newburyport<\/em> Ellmann has created a wisecracking, melancholy Mrs Dalloway<\/em> for the internet age.\u201d \u2015Financial Times<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n “Perhaps the most intensely real depiction of the life of the quotidian mind I\u2019ve ever witnessed… what Ducks<\/em> [Newburyport<\/em>] amounts to is one great trauma diagnosis for the entire country…It\u2019s a colossal feat.” \u2015The Spectator<\/em> <\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cA book about a mother\u2019s love, but also about loss and grief, and anxiety dreams about Donald Trump, and despair about mass shootings \u2026 It is also a catalogue of life\u2019s many injuries and mishaps \u2026 and of the simple joys and consolations of memory and imagination. [A] triumph.\u201d \u2015The Guardian<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cEpic.\u201d \u2015Associated Press<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cA jaw-dropping miracle.\u201d \u2015Library Journal <\/em>(starred review)<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cA remarkable portrait of a woman in contemporary America contemplating her own life and society\u2019s storm clouds … brilliant.\u201d \u2015Publishers Weekly <\/em><\/strong>(starred review)<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cMesmerizing, witty, maximalist…a bravura and caring inquiry into Earth\u2019s glory, human creativity and catastrophic recklessness, and the transcendence of love.\u201d \u2015Booklist <\/em><\/strong>(starred review)<\/strong><\/p>\n “In Ducks, Newburyport<\/em> the invisible expropriation of women\u2019s domestic labour is tied to the despoiling of the environment and the macho degradation of the public sphere. But this is to suggest the novel can be boiled down to one particular theme, when its entire premise refuses any kind of summary. In reading Ducks,<\/em> wonder gives way to frustration, which gives way to wonder again, until finishing becomes a kind of contemplative vigil \u2013 an exercise in dedication…Ducks<\/em> is asking us to imagine what a total, unboundaried empathy with another person could feel like.” \u2015New Statesman<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n “This is one of the most bonkers, but absolutely brilliant, novels I have ever read…by turns poignant, funny, repetitive, poetic, banal and wise…this is a brave and bracing book for both author and publisher to have \u00adproduced, and in the sheer commitment it demands of the reader is a brilliant antidote to the simplistic realm of clickbait, acronyms and sloganeering that the novel describes and critiques so well. Bravo!” \u2015The Tablet<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n “A wildly ambitious and totally unique masterpiece of the kind that doesn\u2019t frequently appear in contemporary fiction…Once or twice while reading a novel, you might encounter an image in passing that suddenly knocks you out of the book and into a dreamy state, a little detail that jumps out at you and consumes your attention for a moment. This happens so often in \u201cDucks\u201d that reading the book can be like a collection of immediately interesting objects, like that specific kind of American home so stuffed with objects that every moment is one of discovery. The material culture of American life is splayed across these pages.” \u2015Michigan Daily<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n “Innovative, intelligent, and simply extraordinary.” \u2015Lit Hub<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cA wildly ambitious and righteously angry portrait of contemporary America.\u201d \u2015The Observer<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n “It is a soaring example of how a gifted writer can spin one sentence into a complete, immersive story.” \u2015<\/strong>Financial Times<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n Baking a multitude of tartes tatins for local restaurants, an Ohio housewife contemplates her four kids, husband, cats and chickens. Also, America’s ignoble past, and her own regrets. She is surrounded by dead lakes, fake facts, Open Carry maniacs, and oodles of online advice about survivalism, veil toss duties, and how to be more like Jane Fonda. But what do you do when you keep stepping on your son’s toy tractors, your life depends on stolen land and broken treaties, and nobody helps you when you get a flat tire on the interstate, not even the Abominable Snowman? When are you allowed to start swearing?<\/p>\n With a torrent of consciousness and an intoxicating coziness, Ducks, Newburyport<\/em> lays out a whole world for you to tramp around in, by turns frightening and funny. A heart-rending indictment of America’s barbarity, and a lament for the way we are blundering into environmental disaster, this book is both heresy\u2014and a revolution in the novel.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\nFrom the Back Cover<\/h3>\n
WINNER OF THE 2019 GOLDSMITHS PRIZE<\/strong>
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2019 BOOKER PRIZE<\/strong>
A NEW <\/em>YORKER <\/em>BEST BOOK OF 2019<\/strong>
A NEW YORK TIMES<\/em> NOTABLE BOOK OF 2019<\/strong>
A TIME <\/em>MUST-READ BOOK OF 2019<\/strong>
A WASHINGTON POST<\/em> NOTABLE WORK OF FICTION 2019<\/strong>
A CHICAGO TRIBUNE <\/em>BEST BOOK OF 2019<\/strong>
A GLOBE & MAIL<\/em> BOOK THAT SHAPED 2019<\/strong>
A BOOK RIOT<\/em> BEST BOOK OF 2019<\/strong>
A TIMES<\/em> CRITICS’ TOP BOOK OF 2019<\/strong>
A TORONTO STAR<\/em> TOP TEN BOOK OF 2019<\/strong> <\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\nAbout the Author<\/h3>\n