A scorching collection of essays from the Booker-shortlisted author of Ducks, Newburyport
Lucy Ellmann’s first novel, Sweet Desserts, won the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1988. Her latest, Ducks, Newburyport, was shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize, the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the Saltire Prize, and won the 2019 Goldsmiths Prize and the 2020 James Tait Black Prize. She has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, Independent, Irish Times and other publications. American by birth, she now lives in Scotland.
‘Breathlessly brilliant…An extraordinary achievement of wit and
imagination…This isn’t just one of the outstanding books of 2019,
it’s one of the outstanding books of the century, so far.’
*Irish Times*
‘Lunatic and splenetic and distinctive... I begin to suspect [Lucy
Ellmann] might be some sort of genius.’
*Telegraph*
‘Reading Ellmann is like finding bits of broken glass in your
lollipop.’
*Evening Standard*
‘Hilarious, eye-wateringly funny…I have found a new hero in Lucy
Ellmann.’
*Scotsman*
‘A wildly ambitious and righteously angry portrait of contemporary
America.’
*Observer*
‘[Readers] will recognise Ellmann’s dauntless cataloguing of
desires, her refusal to be anything but self-directed...It’s a book
about a mother’s love, but also about loss and grief, and anxiety
dreams about Donald Trump, and despair about mass shootings...It is
also a catalogue of life’s many injuries and mishaps...and of the
simple joys and consolations of memory and imagination. [A]
triumph.’
*Guardian*
‘Ellmann is an expert juggler with words. Her satire is deft,
sophisticated and enchantingly surreal.’
*Sunday Telegraph*
‘Ulysses has nothing on this.’
*Cosmopolitan*
‘Ducks, Newburyport is like nothing you’ve ever read before. A
cacophony of humour, violence and Joycean word play, it
engages—furiously—with the detritus of domesticity as well as
Trump’s America. This audacious and epic novel is brilliantly
conceived, and challenges the reader with its virtuosity and
originality.’
*2019 Booker Prize Jury Citation*
‘A jaw-dropping miracle.’
*Library Journal (starred review)*
‘A remarkable portrait of a woman in contemporary America
contemplating her own life and society’s storm
clouds…Brilliant.’
*Publishers Weekly (starred review)*
‘A work resplendent in ambition, humour and humanity…It is a
cornucopia of everyday experience, 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…In Ducks, Newburyport, Ellmann has created a
wisecracking, melancholy Mrs Dalloway for the internet age.’
*Financial Times*
'Ducks’ achievement is in making the thoughts of its unnamed
narrator feel timely, fresh, and on a pressing narrative
trajectory. It manages intimacies between the narrator and reader,
between the self and the other, and between literary and actual
time...Ducks, Newburyport, as all the best novels do, had
reenchanted the world.'
*LA Review of Books*
‘Is it any good? Oh my word, yes. Reading it at this point in time
feels like an act of human solidarity, a commitment to a world of
truth and reason...No other novel published this year is likely to
have a stronger claim on the attention of contemporary or future
readers.’
*Literary Review*
'This book has its face pressed up against the pane of the present;
its form mimics the way our minds move now...Let the novel open
like an oubliette under your feet. It feels dense at first, a bit
like drowning, without a period or paragraph break in sight. But a
rhythm asserts itself and a structure, musical and associative….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 — it
demands the very attentiveness, the care, that it enshrines.'
*New York Times*
‘Wondrous…A complex book about a complicated time. It reads like an
outpour of humanity beckoning to be heard.'
*Electric Literature*
'Ellmann captures the pathos of the everyday...The time and care
that she lavishes on her narrator seem like their own form of
political speculation—that every individual is owed an unending
devotion, and that such devotion, applied universally, might change
the fate of the world.'
*New Yorker*
‘Brilliantly ambitious...As accumulative, as pointed, as
death-addled, as joyous, as storied, as multitudinous and as large
as life.’
*New York Times Book Review*
‘Effervescent…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.’
*Chicago Review of Books*
‘Mesmerising, witty, maximalist…A bravura and caring inquiry into
Earth’s glory, human creativity and catastrophic recklessness, and
the transcendence of love.’
*Booklist*
‘A masterpiece like no other.’
*Vogue*
‘Astonishing…A Molly Bloom for middle America.’
*BBC Front Row*
‘Monumentally original…Brave and funny…Splendidly idiosyncratic,
utterly uncompromising…I have never read anything quite like
it.’
*Mechanics Institute*
‘Hilarious, gigantic, jaw-breakingly delicious.’
*Bookmunch*
‘Full of wit and intelligence…One of the most charming and
genuinely funny characters I have come across in recent years.’
*Herald Scotland*
‘A bravura feat: a stream of consciousness, a transcript of the
mind under modern conditions, and (as a consequence of Ellmann’s
ferocious and succinct wit) very funny.’
*Scottish Review of Books*
‘Ellmann adeptly riffs on a vertiginous range of subjects, all the
while carefully avoiding the didacticism that would warp the novel
into a soapbox or a gallows. Her heroine’s anger burns cleanly,
refusing the easy conflagration of self-righteousness. The
cumulative effect is devastating. This is a powerful and deeply
felt indictment of moral failure, a fearful, dazzling bloom of
conscience…A grand, mimetic achievement.’
*Nation*
‘Delicious…Brilliant…Mind-blowing…There are novels, and then there
are extraordinary novels—truly unique, one-of-a-kind, sui
generis—terms that are often used as clichés but I assure you not
in Lucy Ellmann’s case.’
*Counterpunch*
‘A wildly ambitious and totally unique masterpiece…[Ducks,
Newburyport] stands out in the current literary landscape like an
octopus on a sidewalk, a standing challenge to a literary culture
that tends to produce quiet novels in the nineteenth-century
mold.’
*Michigan Daily*
‘A Joycean achievement…A colossal feat…Perhaps the most intensely
real depiction of the life of the quotidian mind I’ve ever
witnessed.’
*Spectator*
‘This amazing sustained narrative…may be the tour de force of our
era, indeed “the great American novel” of now, arguably the
greatest by a woman ever, or at the very least a masterpiece.’
*Jewish Chronicle*
‘Like other great works of art, I believe when we reflect back on
Ducks, Newburyport we will think it strange that the world once
existed without it.’
*Review31*
'I found myself sinking into the narrator’s mind, consumed in such
a way that it was as though we were merging...The length of the
book works to its advantage. Yes, this is a novel about Trump’s
America, but politically it’s about much more than that. The
narrator’s mind slides away from the minutiae of her everyday and
toward meditations on the violence that is baked into the very
structure of the United States and the entire concept of empire
itself...Excess—be it an excess of words, the excess of a new
nation’s attempts to claim land, the excess of human attempts to
cast dominion over nature—is tied, again and again, to
destruction.'
*Paris Review*
'Ambitious, devastating and hilarious…A comprehensive statement on
modern America that’s bound to be a future classic.'
*Happy Mag*
‘If the novel can feel like a colossal hold-all for one clever,
thoughtful, fretful, sad, funny editorialising consciousness, what
makes it gel is a sense of wounding...Ellmann’s stylistic
achievement here is to weave a net of words that honours her
narrator’s unique yet universal self.'
*Saturday Paper*
‘A sublime literary enactment of how guilt, grief, rage, regret,
compassion and every other emotion swirls and ebbs in unbalanced
defiance of rational logic...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.’
*Paris Review*
‘A feat of literature.’
*Good Reading*
‘Absolutely compelling...And although it’s a thousand pages, you
read it with energy and pace and verve. It’s just a great
ride.'
*Five Books*
‘The Goldsmiths Prize rewards work that breaks the mould and opens
up new possibilities for the novel: Ducks is the kind of book that
feels unmistakably contemporary, but that you can’t quite believe
didn’t exist before now...With Ducks, Ellmann reminds us that the
very idea of recreating on the page a “fully formed” human being in
all their unfathomable depth is absurd – while getting closer to
achieving that impossible aim than any writer in recent
memory.’
*Goldsmiths Prize judge Anna Leszkiewicz*
‘This is a book entirely true to its own voice and project; an
extraordinary work of art.’
*Sigrid Rausing*
‘It has fundamentally changed my idea about what the novel can
do.’
*Mark Haddon*
‘Every line has something important, sad, funny and fierce to say
about “civilisation” and its discontents as its female narrator
gives voice to chaos, and expresses the human sublime.’
*Preti Taneja*
‘Ellmann, in this compassionate and moving and funny crumb quilt of
a novel, keeps you enchanted till the very last word and full
stop.'
*Hindu Review*
‘Compulsive and completely readable.’
*TIME*
‘Brilliant…Addictive...There have been comparisons to James Joyce’s
Ulysses, but Ellmann is in a class by herself.’
*Star Tribune*
‘Its great torrent of associations and its rich humour come closer
than anything else to capturing that weird combination of anxiety
and inanity that is the hallmark of our troubled times.’
*Australian Book Review*
‘Very funny, very readable and one of those novels that expand the
possibilities of what a novel can be and do.’
*Mark Haddon*
‘Ducks, Newburyport stretches the imagination and brings to the
universe it seeks to recreate such intensity of purpose and
flamboyance that one would be hard-pressed to think of any other
word other than “original” to describe it.’
*Chigozie Obioma*
‘The most enjoyable unconventional novel I have ever read...I’m in
awe of the ambition of this novel, its range, depth and
inventiveness.’
*Book Riot*
'Dive into this brilliant, funny and poignant Booker Prize finalist
written mostly in one long sentence. Adjust your settings and enjoy
manifold rewards.’
*NZ Listener*
‘Few books make you work this hard, fewer still pull off such an
arresting literary form while capturing the life and mind of an
individual.'
*Urbis*
‘A looping, joyously parenthetical excursion through the mind of an
American housewife and the anxieties and absurdities of our
historical moment.’
*Australian*
‘Far and away the best book I read this year—this century even—is
Lucy Ellmann’s funny, frightening and incredibly addictive Ducks,
Newburyport…Ellmann encapsulates existence in the twenty-first
century, its dimensions and its contours, while offering an intense
portrait of motherhood, of mothering and of being mothered.’
*Australian*
‘Relish the wit, intelligence and love that infuse every line. It
is a novel of easy virtuosity, written from inside the mind of a
suburban everywoman, that will break your heart and reorder your
mental hard drive.'
*Australian*
‘[An] experimental epic that changes the way you think about
narrative and the activity of reading.’
*Adelaide Review*
‘As full of wit as wisdom…Urgent, angry and often very funny.’
*Bookmunch*
‘[Ellmann’s] ire is matched only by an irrepressible comic
impulse…She’s out to foment revolution.’
*Observer*
‘Funny, sarcastic, playful and self-deprecating, but also
provocative and fantastically experimental with language and
structure. Ellmann is a master of lists, a seemingly prosaic
procession of words builds to a rhythm and poetically creates
original insight into how humans are ruining the planet and all of
humanity.’
*Readings*
‘[A] wickedly funny, rousing, depressing, caps-driven work of
linguistic gymnastics hellbent on upbraiding the deleterious forces
of the prevailing misogyny.’
*Guardian*
‘[Lucy Ellmann’s] blazing diatribes and comedic energy fuel the
purposeful lamentation of these hilarious and potent essays.’
*Saturday Paper*
‘Fiery, provocative…For all the wit and wordplay, Ellmann has
important points to make, not least about the way that our flailing
world is upheld.’
*Independent*
‘A series of extremely entertaining rants.’
*BBC Front Row*
'[Ellmann] is just so wise and cynical and angry…she’s not a polite
writer; she doesn’t hold back.’
*RNZ Nine to Noon*
'Something of a literary agent provocateur, lobbing essays like
hand grenades into the public domain, [Lucy Ellmann] covers a wide
range of topics in this collection...Whether satiric, wacky, or
angry, Booker-shortlisted novelist Ellmann is interesting and
fearless.’
*Age*
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