The Shipping News
E. Annie Proulx · b. 1935 · United States
Why it matters
A hapless journalist retreats with his daughters to his ancestral Newfoundland outport, rebuilding a life amid fog, shipwreck lore, and eccentric relatives. Proulx's National Book Award and Pulitzer winner turns clipped, elliptical prose into its own kind of weather.
At a glance
family saga
Difficulty 5/10medium pace337 pagesClipped, fragmentary sentences and Newfoundland dialect take some acclimation.
Deep dive
Why every chapter opens with a diagram of a knot, and what it takes for a man named after a coil of unused rope to finally be put to work.
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