The Shipping News

Annie Proulx · 1993 CE · Novel · Modern / American · Contemporary

Quoyle, a third-rate newspaperman in upstate New York with a wife who despises him, is left with two small daughters and an aunt who proposes they all go back to the Newfoundland rock the family came from. He gets a desk at the Gammy Bird covering car wrecks and the shipping news, moves into a green house that was once dragged across the ice on ropes, and begins to learn what his ancestors did there. Chapters open with entries from The Ashley Book of Knots, which Proulx kept beside her as she wrote; it took both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award.

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