In our devastatingly enjoyable Book of the Week, Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann, an Ohio mother bakes pies while the the world bombards her with radioactivity and fake facts. She worries about her children, caramelisation, chickens, guns, tardigrades, medical bills, environmental disaster, mystifying confrontations at the supermarket, and the best time to plant nasturtiums. She regrets most of her past, a million tiny embarrassments, her poverty, the loss of her mother, and the genocide on which the United States was founded. Lucy Ellmann's scorching indictment of the ills of modern life is also a plea for kindness, a remarkable virtuoso sentence, and an unforgivably funny evocation of the relentlessness of one person's thoughts. 
>>Read Thomas's review. 
>>Read an extract. 
>> Lucy Ellmann does not care about what male reviewers think about having to read such a long book written about a woman.
>>"I wooed my husband with Thomas Bernhard's Concrete."
>>"I don’t like overpopulation, but I have infinite respect for motherhood."
>>"All art that's any good is political." 
>>"I WROTE MY OWN DAMN BOOK!"
>>Ellmann's Irish connection. 
>>Ducks, Newburyport has been short-listed for the 2019 Booker Prize. Find out about the other books on the short list. 
>>We can send you either the Galley Beggar Press edition or the Text Publishing edition (or both).