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    Shipping News
    Shipping News
    Shipping News
    Audiobook12 hours

    Shipping News

    Written by Annie Proulx

    Narrated by Paul Hecht

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateMar 15, 2011
    ISBN9781442342590
    Shipping News
    Author

    Annie Proulx

    Annie Proulx is the author of eleven books, including the novels The Shipping News and Barkskins, and the story collection Close Range. Her many honors include a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and a PEN/Faulkner award. Her story “Brokeback Mountain,” which originally appeared in The New Yorker, was made into an Academy Award–winning film. Fen, Bog, and Swamp is her second work of nonfiction. She lives in New Hampshire. 

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    Reviews for Shipping News

    4/5

    175 ratings119 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I think it takes nerve to give your book the title The Shipping News.The shipping news is that dull stuff in the agate type in the last section of the paper that nobody reads -- right?LA PALOMA IN FROM HONG KONG - Captain Jacoby, MasterBut this The Shipping News is that rarity - prize winning book that deserved all the plated tin people threw at it.Quoyle is a half baked sort of journalist in upstate New York with two young kids and a wife who runs around. In a heart stopping tragedy, the wife is killed and Quoyle (pronounced like "Coil") is scooped up by a distant relative aunt and they move up to a rough and lonely part of Newfoundland.And that's when the wind starts whispering in the sails of this graceful little book.The house they move into is a storm tossed ruin, the people are sometimes soft as a sea-breeze friendly and sometimes cruel and dark and violent as the sea.And our Quoyle pulls up his sea boots and learns what he's capable of and finds a place in the community and learns his way in the sea. And the girls learn too. Even the aunt has her story to tell.Wonderful rich complex writing - you will be looking up a lot of words that are local argot or archaic or just the writer telling her tale. Just go with it.The Newfoundland coast is as much a character as any flesh and body person in the book.Read for a book group - and I loved it

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      An interesting theme of ropes and knot tying pervades the story. Quoyle, an awkward lumpish man marries the mercurial Petal and has two children with Her. She cheats on him repeatedly. After selling the children to a pornographer she is killed in a car accident. Meanwhile Quoyle's parents die. He links up with an aunt he doesn't really know and they moved to Newfoundland. They move into the ancestral home. He takes a job with the local newspaper. The story from their involves all the local characters in the small town which is dominated by the fishing industry now in decline. The story starts very slowly with way too much florid descriptive terms, a lot of words I think were just made up or culled from AP English lists. I find that distracting and it was a slow start to the book. However by page 101 gets involved in the story and the characters. Either the writing gets better or the story gets engaging enough to keep one's attention. The ultimate theme of what constitutes love is worth reading to the end. By the end one can see why this won the Pulitzer Prize.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      A delightful tale for winter! When so much is unappealing as you watch the snow fall accummulate and feel no one understands cabin fever and isolation like you are experiencing it now, The Shipping News is a welcome compliment to the weather you are experiencing and the small town mentality that creeps in when a neighborly side-walk shoveling feels fully called for.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Gorgeous poetic prose. Love it.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      This was a definite contender for book of the year for me. I'd seen the film a while back and enjoyed it (Kevin Spacey, Julianne Moore, Judi Dench.. what's not to love), but the novel was even better than I'd hoped.Quoyle (known by his surname) is one of life's good guys who's perpetually on the wrong side of lady luck. He missed the queue for good looks, is continually laid off from his job, and eventually winds up marrying the worst kind of woman who grinds her heel on his heart on a daily basis. When she's killed in a road accident (no spoiler - on the book jacket) he takes up his aunt's offer to take his two young daughters back to the family's homeland in Newfoundland for a new start.This is an incredibly atmospheric book - life on Newfoundland feels so vivid, from the taste of the seafood to the grey winter days, the swelling seas and the camaraderie between the townsfolk who help turn Quoyle's life around. There is enough plot to keep you turning the pages, and yet it's gentle and unrushed, with writing that's made to be savoured.This is a book that deserves a great review, but I'm totally knackered and incapable of stringing any eloquent sentences together. Just trust me - it's brilliant.5 stars - a book that truly deserves a future re-read.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Beautiful, rich, remarkable writing, and the narration is just excellent.
    • 5/5
      Exceptional recording! The narrator mastered a Dickensian array of voices and dialects brilliantly. The audio is probably more engaging than the print.
    • 2/5
      A friend of mine read this book and told me that I should read it. I took his advice on it. And I was severely disappointed. As a rule, I read an book 100 pages before putting it down. That way I can decide whether or not it is worth reading any more additional pages. In this case, I was glad that I stopped. This book is an award winner, which attracted me to it, and has weird characters as well, which is also a plus. But I really couldn't get into this novel and the author's very eccentric writing style. I can definitely see the appeal in this book; the characters seem to be well constructed, but I simply got bored. Maybe I should have read on, but why read on when there are so many more books to read?
    • 5/5
      Excellent story, excellent maritime story
    • 3/5
      What's It About?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.What Did I Think?I didn't really care for the characters at all. They can best be described as quirky, flawed, and at bottom of the "food chain" when it comes to human beings. After a time they do begin to grow on you. This is not a fast read by any means and some of the boating terms completely went over my head. In spite of that I found myself wanting to know how Quoyle would deal with the next challenge life tossed him. What I did immensely enjoy was the author's details of the landscape and the character of the people that inhabited it....something I generally don't pay a great deal of attention to. Anyone looking for just excitement in a book will probably want to skip this one
    • 5/5
      In the middle of his life, Quoyle, a news hack is suddenly widowed. He takes his two daughters to the Newfoundland coast of his youth, only to discover his private demons. Proulx portrays the contemporary American family, unpacked, amid the sere magic of Newfoundland.
    • 4/5
      It took me a while to get into this book. However, my appreciation of Proulx's descriptive metaphors kept me intrigued and the book improved.Quoyle's cheating wife is killed in a car accident with her lover. He makes the decision to move from New York with his aunt and two young daughters to his family's ancestral home in Newfoundland. With a job at a small town newspaper, the lumpish middle-aged Quoyle becomes immersed in life in the harsh landscape and the fantastically diverse people who make their home there. "These waters, thought Quoyle, haunted by lost ships, fishermen, explorers gurgled down into sea holes as black as a dog's throat" (p. 222). "He came up once last summer, but left after two days. On his way to New Zealand to study some kind of exotic Southern Hemisphere crab" (p. 267). "Was love then like a bag of assorted sweets passed around from which one might choose more than once? Some might sting the tongue, some invoke night perfume. Some had centres as bitter as gall, some blended honey and poison, some were quickly swallowed. And among the common bull's-eye and peppermints a few rare ones; one or two with deadly needles at the heart, another that brought calm and gentle pleasure. Were his fingers closing on that one?" (p. 332). Beautifully written.
    • 5/5
      Quoyle is an overweight loser with a cruel past, stuck with no friends or relatives, a dead-end job and a beloved wife who is inventively cruel. After the worst tragedy he can imagine, his only hopes are his two small children, one of whom is decidedly peculiar, and a mysterious aunt who shows up to help out. When they set off for Newfoundland, in the direction of his dubious family roots, adventures of a startling nature ensue. Although the story?s details are rather grim ? haunting visions, shocking tragedies, brutal weather, shipwrecks and people dying right and left -- one is surprised and delighted by sudden scraps of wit that are likely to provoke a laugh-out-loud response. All of this told in a voice like a journalist talking with a cigar in his mouth, spouting poetry. Finally, a growing crowd of charming, quirky characters joins hands to move the story toward small triumphs and great truths, and it all ends too soon, no matter how slowly you read. An absolute gem of a book.
    • 5/5
      Well told story. Cold, wind, storm, death - these are not what I look for in a novel. But Proulx does her work so well that I'm drawn in. The book is cleverly structured around stories of boats, seamanship and especially knots, which add depth and interest.
    • 4/5
      Pulitzer prize for fictionI don't think I would ever have chosen this book for myself, so I'm really glad that my book club did. The first half is so bleak - Quoyle's life is so tiring. I quote from the end of Chapter 17 "Thirty-six years old and this was the first time anyone ever said he'd done it right." The story climbs from there. And while Quoyle never soars he does experience some highs and a lot of good even sailing. Definitely worth reading.
    • 2/5
      This is an extremely atmospheric book. I could almost feel the fog and the bleakness. That fog and bleakness goes on for a long time, and I was pretty bored by the end. I never felt pulled into the story or the characters. Rather, the landscape itself seemed like the most compelling character of all.
    • 3/5
      I have wanted to read The Shipping News since I first learnt of its Pulitzer Prize winning credentials in The Bulletin back in the 'nineties. I am not usually a fan of recent fiction but this work is very good. A back cover review cited from The Sunday Telegraph wrote of the style as "compressed" and "poetic" and this mirrors my own thoughts on the prose. What impresses me most about Proulx is that she did not publish her first novel until she was in her fifties, and The Shipping News is a masterpiece, proving that it is still possible to flower in the latter stages of middle-age. Having travelled briefly through The Maritimes, specifically Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, the novel brought back memories of the frozen sea and the various shanties along the coast of New Brunswick. At the time, these sights sent me back to my childhood memories of the television series The Beachcombers (although the series is from the west coast), and what was then that strange land of First Nations peoples, "Mounties" and Quebecois to the north of the United States rarely seen on Australian television. The cold salt air, the smell of seafood, that the sea could be frozen at all - Proulx captures these magnificently while weaving a story of lost souls, like driftwood, colliding with events directed by freezing currents. Towards the end I had to try to piece together the various characters whose individuality tended to blend into one another. In this edition, a typographical error where Bunny is a "he"; and another where the character Tert Card appears as Terd Card, stick in my mind. Nevertheless, on finishing the book I was rewarded with the tingling sensation of a well-written novel and an enlightened story. It was worth the wait, lived up to the expectations that have been built up for me over the last twenty years, and encouraged me to consider expanding my reading program beyond my recent focus on early twentieth-century authors. Will The Shipping News stand the test of time and become a classic? Given that the heartache of dying communities far from the fringes of the burgeoning metropolises continues while shallow urban existence intrigues, when the fa?ade collapses, The Shipping News might just become the "backronym" that first truly captured the phenomenon in quality literature.
    • 4/5
      A great story of an American loser who moves to northern NFLD to find himself and ends up working on a small town paper. Good characters and an honest portrait of the place (people who live there found the book "boring").
    • 5/5
      I loved this book! Had to read it two or three times :)
    • 3/5
      Begins beautifully and sustains it about two-thirds through, but then, as is often the case with novels, the wheels start to rattle as the writer races to resolve things. Characters must reach point b, themes must be brought to a head, conflicts finished, the writer must show that she is Thoughtful, all at the expense of rhythm and beauty. This may be what sets great novelists apart from good ones. Also, the two ending paragraphs are like the moral of a fairy tale, which I don't care for; it reminds me of bad movies--end credits, banal music. So 3.5 stars, but 5 stars for the first bits.
    • 4/5
      LOVE, LOVE, LOVE this book. The setting, the characters all come to life is such a vivid portrait. I love reading about that part of the country anyway and this novel made it come to life. The characters covered such a wide spectrum, some you loved and some you hate, but you still want to know about them. THe chapter heading are quite humorous, they are taken from various books about knots and mariner jargon. As usual Proux comes through again. A great read!!
    • 5/5
      ?Omaloor Bay is called after Quoyles. Loonies. They was wild and inbred, half-wits and murderers. Half of them was low-minded.? (162)Annie Proulx Rocks. Pun Intended. Quoyle, protagonist of The Shipping News and known only by his surname, is a huge, miserable lug of a man, a failure-extraordinaire, excoriated by his family and cheated on by his wife. Middle-aged and father of two young daughters, Bunny and Sunshine, he agrees to move with his aunt, Agnis Hamm, back to the land of his roots: Newfoundland. Killick-Claw proves to be his silver lining. He lands a job at a quirky, local newspaper, Gammy Bird, where writes a weekly column, ?The Shipping News.? (Part of his charm, the paper owner assures him, is that he doesn?t have a clue what he is talking about). Quoyle settles in, and one new experience follows another: he makes some steadfast friends; experiences some adventure on the high seas; and is in danger of coming of age when he is attracted to local widow, Wavey Prowse.The Shipping News is a story of Newfoundland and of its people: an isolated, wild, untamable place, populated by characters who are quirky as hell, tough as nails, and salt of the earth. By extension, it is also a story of the sea, glassy and murderous in equal parts. Proulx excels at bringing both place and character to the page. She introduces us to Killick-Claw?s harbormaster, identifying him first by physical appearance, and then by place, as he recalls a storm at sea:__________ ?Diddy Shovel?s skin was like asphalt, fissured and cracked, thickened by a lifetime of weather, the scurf of age. Stubble worked through the craquelured surface. His eyelids collapsed in protective folds at the outer corners. Bristled eyebrows; enlarged pores gave the nose a sandy appearance. Jacket split at the shoulder seams.? (79)?It never leaves you. You never hear the wind after that without you remember that banshee moan, remember the watery mountains, crests torn into foam, the poor ship groaning. Bad enough at any time, but this was the deep of winter and the cold was terrible, the ice formed on rail and rigging until vessels was carrying thousands of pounds of ice. The snow drove so hard it was just a roar of white outside these windows. Couldn?t see the street below. The sides of the houses to the northwest was plastered a foot thick with snow as hard as steel.? (83)__________I think I?ve already made it obvious, but Proulx is genius. Her writing and her tone throughout capture both Newfoundland and its inhabitants beautifully, her sense of place and of character brilliant. Nor does she shy away from political comment, addressing head-on the longstanding economic strife of resource-rich Newfoundland, created in large(st) part by politics and politicians ? ?those twits in Ottawa.? (285) This is a book I?ve had on my shelf for years that I kept meaning to get to ? I?m glad ?later? finally arrived. Highly recommended.?All the complex wires of life were stripped out and he could see the structure of life. Nothing but rock and sea, the tiny figures of humans and animals against them for a brief time.? (196)
    • 3/5
      The way that the book was written made it hard to get into for me, but I did feel sympathy towards the characters and a certain desire to know what would happen next.
    • 5/5
      'I enjoyed Poscards so much I had to read this one and it, also, was absolutely marvelous. A strange beat to her writing and she captures your imagination with wonderful descriptions and dialogue. Bittersweet but great.'
    • 3/5
      Liked the book WAY better than the movie.
    • 5/5
      I need to reread this soon, but I remember being delighted and absorbed by this quirky tale of new beginnings for Quoyle, our hapless hero, in a wildly imagined Newfoundland. I loved the character of the aunt!
    • 4/5
      This was good. Your listings would be vastly improved if you added Toni Morrison novels.
    • 4/5
      This was a story with a very simple plot, but it was so well written it doesn?t matter. It?s about a social outcast looking to overcome past abuse and get a new start. The characters in the book were all very unique and each told stories of their own struggles. The writing style of the book is very different, and took some getting used to, but it worked well with the story. The author?s depiction of the Newfoundland landscape was so brilliantly done that I felt as though I had been there. The life of a small, coastal town was wonderfully captured. For some odd reason I especially loved the chapter headings and pictures of the knots. I can?t wait to finally see the movie now that I?ve read the book. A great read.
    • 5/5
      There are a lot of good things I could say about this book: the sense of a seaside hamlet community, which the author conveys in layers, as she presents everything else; the changing seasons (and living through them); the changing world, for the worse, mainly, but the resilience of those who adapt to it; the exotic and often dangerous realities, in a wild but at the same time amenable place. But above all, the portrait of its characters, a piece at a time, with each given his or her due.
    • 5/5
      Beautifully written. Proulx creates a world that sucked me in from the first paragraph. The plot is simple - a social outcast finds a family and a home - but the journey is so worth the time. If you missed this one, or only saw the movie, run don't walk to your library or bookstore.