The Shipping News
| The Shipping News | |
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| Author(s) | E. Annie Proulx |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | Scribner |
| Publication date | 1993 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-684-19337-X (hardback edition) |
| OCLC Number | 26502801 |
| Dewey Decimal | 813/.54 20 |
| LC Classification | PS3566.R697 S4 1993 |
The Shipping News is a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning novel by American writer E. Annie Proulx which was published in 1993. It was adapted into a film of the same name, released in 2001.
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[edit] Plot summary
The story centers on Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper reporter from upstate New York whose father emigrated from Newfoundland. Shortly after his parents' suicide, Quoyle's unfaithful and abusive wife Petal leaves town and attempts to sell their daughters to sex traffickers. Soon thereafter, Petal and her lover are killed in a car accident; the young girls are located by police and returned to Quoyle. Despite his daughters' safe return, Quoyle's life is collapsing, and his paternal aunt, Agnis Hamm, convinces him to return to Newfoundland for a new beginning. They return to their ancestral home on Quoyle's Point.
He obtains work as a traffic accident reporter for the Gammy Bird, the local newspaper in Killick-Claw, a small town. The Gammy Bird's editor also asks him to document the shipping news, arrivals and departures from the local port, which soon grows into Quoyle's signature articles on boats of interest in the harbour.
Quoyle gradually makes friends within the community, learns about his own troubled family background, and begins a relationship with a local woman, Wavey. Quoyle's growth in confidence and emotional strength, as well as his ability to be comfortable in a loving relationship, become the book's main focus. Quoyle learns deep and disturbing secrets about his ancestors that emerge in strange ways.
[edit] Ashley's influence
In her acknowledgments, Proulx states, "And without the inspiration of Clifford W. Ashley's wonderful 1944 work, The Ashley Book of Knots, which I had the good fortune to find at a yard sale for a quarter, this book would have remained just a thread of an idea." Ashley's illustrations and quotes are used at chapter headings throughout the book. Some names in the book are taken from knots, for example Killick hitch and coil. This coil is called a quoyle, the protagonist's name, a coil of rope only one layer thick, flat, "so that it may be walked on..." This metaphor sums up Quoyle's relationship with the world around him in the novel's first half.
[edit] Awards and nominations
- Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 1994
- National Book Award, 1993
- The Irish Times International Fiction Prize, 1993
[edit] External links
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