LUCY ELLMANN describes herself as a misanthropologist. She has written seven novels, including Sweet Desserts (Guardian Fiction Prize, 1988), Mimi, and Dot in the Universe. Ducks, Newburyport, published by Galley Beggar in 2019, won the Goldsmiths Prize and the James Tait Black, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Saltire, and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. Lucy’s book of essays, Things Are Against Us (2021), was also published by Galley Beggar Press. Born in the USA, she moved to England as a teenager and now lives in Scotland.
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Praise for Ducks Newburyport:
“That rare thing: a book which, not long after its publication, one can unhesitatingly call a masterpiece.” —Erica Wagner, chair of the judges, The Goldsmiths Prize
“The unstoppable monologue of an Ohio housewife in Lucy Ellmann’s extraordinary 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
“In her latest novel, Lucy Ellmann doesn’t just carry on as before: she doubles up, doubles down, and absolutely goes for broke. … Success? Failure? A triumph.” —Ian Samson, The Guardian
“Resplendent in ambition, humour, and humanity. … In Ducks, Newburyport, Ellmann has created a wisecracking Mrs Dalloway for the internet age.” —The Financial Times
“A novel that rewards perseverance, is truly unique, and feels like an absence in your life when you finish it.” —The Observer
“Forbidding and magnificent... Ellmann has produced a domestic epic of modern American life in the Trump era.” —Prospect
“A Joycean achievement…A colossal feat…Perhaps the most intensely real depiction of the life of the quotidian mind I’ve ever witnessed.” —Spectator
“What thrills is the novel’s density, vibrancy and, crucially, its innovation. … Turn to any page and you’ll find it tightly packed and working overtime to redefine what the novel can do.” —New Statesman
“A feat of simultaneous compression and expansion... Among many other things, [Ducks, Newburyport] is a rebuke to the frequent downgrading of the 'domestic' in literature.” —Alex Clark, The Guardian
“Full of wit and intelligence... and one of the most intriguing, charming and genuinely funny characters I have come across in recent years.” —The Herald
“A bravura fear: a stream of consciousness, a transcript of the world under modern conditions, and (as a consequence of Ellmann’s fierce and succinct wit) very funny.” —The Scottish Review of Books
“An impressive feat… Ellmann’s 1024 pages put her male contemporaries in the shade.” —The Sunday Times
“A huge achievement.” —The TLS
“Astonishing. … A Molly Bloom for middle America.” —BBC Front Row
“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.” —Review 31
“Hilarious, gigantic, jaw-breakingly delicious… Ducks, Newburyport contains multitudes. This is the book of the year and of the first couple of decades of the twenty-first century.” —Bookmunch
“Monumentally original… brave and funny… Splendidly idiosyncratic, utterly uncompromising… I have never read anything quite like it.” —Mechanics Institute
“Ulysses has nothing on this.” —Cosmopolitan
“Extraordinary... astounding... amazing... one of the outstanding books of the century, so far.” —The Irish Times
“The time and care [Ellmann] 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.” —The New Yorker
“Ignore the laundry. Let this novel open like an oubliette under your feet.” —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times
“Fun, compulsive and utterly readable.” —Time Magazine
“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
“Timely, fresh… and possibly one of the most important books of the decade.” —The LA Review of Books
“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 skilfully it holds a mirror up to society, then Ellmann has surely written the most important novel of this era.” —Paris Review
“Sei Shonagon [and] Walt Whitman… are the intellectual company Ellmann keeps. … Ducks, Newburyport [is] as accumulative, as pointed, as death-addled, as joyous, as storied, as multitudinous and as large as life.” —Martin Riker, The New York Times
“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)
“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
“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
“Brilliant… Addictive… There have been comparisons to James Joyce’s Ulysses, but Ellmann is in a class by herself.” —Star Tribune
“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.” —James Bradley, 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 21st century, its dimensions and its contours, while offering an intense portrait of motherhood, of mothering and of being mothered.” —Diane Stubbings, 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.” —Geordie Williamson, Australian
“[An] experimental epic that changes the way you think about narrative and the activity of reading.” —Adelaide Review
Praise for Things Are Against Us:
“[With] ire matched only by irrepressible comic impulse… She’s out to foment revolution, and this book is nothing less than a manifesto.” —The Observer
“A wickedly funny, rousing, depressing, caps-driven work of linguistic gymnastics hellbent on upbraiding the prevailing forces of the prevailing misogyny.” —The Guardian
“Singularly propulsive, balancing conversational irreverence with biting acuity, Lucy Ellmann’s writing drips with wry humour and productive anger.” —The i
“Witty, excoriating… it’s hard to imagine that Lucy Ellmann’s first collection of essays will have pride of place at the Bullingdon Club.” —The Independent
“Alight with wit, scorchingly feminist and pretty damn mad about the state of the world: most particularly, the way the world treats women.” —Harper’s Bazaar
“A series of extremely entertaining rants… about everything that is bothering Lucy Ellmann in the world.” —BBC Radio 4 Front Row
“Caustic, clever... [Ellmann is] a satirist and polemicist in the Swiftian tradition.” —The TLS