![]() ![]() When I first tried to read The Shipping News, close to first publication and its Pulitzer Prize win, I couldn’t get past Quoyle’s complete hopelessness and rock-bottom life. Through the good offices of Partridge, now living in California, Quoyle obtains a job on another newspaper, The Gammy Bird*, where one of his responsibilities is to cover the shipping news. Agnis is returning to her childhood home in Newfoundland and persuades Quoyle to bring his daughters and return with her. The turning point comes when his parents die and his wife is killed in a car crash, and he meets his aunt, Agnis Hamm, for the first time. Friendless except for the chance-met Partridge, Quoyle lurches from debacle to disaster in a life distinguished only by intermittent employment as a hack journalist, a loveless marriage with an exploitative and emotionally abusive partner, and becoming the father of two neglected small daughters. The story centres on Quoyle, who is called only by his surname throughout the book and is the despised younger son of an expatriate Newfoundland family living in the United States. ![]() ![]() It was made into a film in 2001, starring Kevin Spacey, Julianne Moore, and Judi Dench as “the aunt.” The Shipping News was first published in 1993 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1994. ![]()
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