num_pages: 337
description: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News is a vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the contemporary North American family.Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a “head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair...features as bunched as kissed fingertips,” is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing wife meets her just desserts. An aunt convinces Quoyle and his two emotionally disturbed daughters to return with her to the starkly beautiful coastal landscape of their ancestral home in Newfoundland. Here, on desolate Quoyle’s Point, in a house empty except for a few mementos of the family’s unsavory past, the battered members of three generations try to cobble up new lives.Newfoundland is a country of coast and cove where the mercury rarely rises above seventy degrees, the local culinary delicacy is cod cheeks, and it’s easier to travel by boat and snowmobile than on anything with wheels. In this harsh place of cruel storms, a collapsing fishery, and chronic unemployment, the aunt sets up as a yacht upholsterer in nearby Killick-Claw, and Quoyle finds a job reporting the shipping news for the local weekly, the Gammy Bird (a paper that specializes in sexual-abuse stories and grisly photos of car accidents).As the long winter closes its jaws of ice, each of the Quoyles confronts private demons, reels from catastrophe to minor triumph—in the company of the obsequious Mavis Bangs; Diddy Shovel the strongman; drowned Herald Prowse; cane-twirling Beety; Nutbeem, who steals foreign news from the radio; a demented cousin the aunt refuses to recognize; the much-zippered Alvin Yark; silent Wavey; and old Billy Pretty, with his bag of secrets. By the time of the spring storms Quoyle has learned how to gut cod, to escape from a pickle jar, and to tie a true lover’s knot.(front flap)
language: English
title: The Shipping News
titlecomplete: The Shipping News
characters: Bunny, Petal Bear, Agnis Hamm, Dennis Buggit, Billy Pretty, Beety Buggit, Tert Card, B. Beaufield Nutbeem, Wavey Prowse, Jack Buggit, Sunshine, Quoyle
genres: Fiction, American, Canada, Literature, Adult, Classics, Novels, Contemporary, Adult Fiction, Literary Fiction
ratings_count: 143736
places: Canada, Newfoundland and Labrador
awards: awardedAt: 757411200000
name: Pulitzer Prize
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 725875200000
name: National Book Award
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 725875200000
name: Irish Times International Fiction Prize, awardedAt: 725875200000
name: Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 725875200000
name: National Book Critics Circle Award
category: Fiction
publisher: Scribner Classics