SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2019 | OBSERVER FICTION PICKS 2019 | THE HERALD FICTION PICKS 2019 | THE IRISH TIMES FICTION PICKS 2019 | SCOTTISH REVIEW OF BOOKS FICTION PICKS 2019 | COSMOPOLITAN FICTION PICKS 2019

Latticing one cherry pie after another, an Ohio housewife tries to bridge the gaps between reality and the torrent of meaningless info that is the United States of America. She worries about her children, her dead parents, African elephants, the bedroom rituals of "happy couples", Weapons of Mass Destruction, and how to hatch an abandoned wood pigeon egg. Is there some trick to surviving survivalists? School shootings? Medical debts? Franks 'n' beans?

A scorching indictment of America's barbarity, past and present, and a lament for the way we are sleepwalking into environmental disaster, Ducks, Newburyport is a heresy, a wonder—and a revolution in the novel.