Ducks, Newburyport

Ducks, Newburyport is a novel by the British writer Lucy Ellmann, published in 2019. It is written in the stream of consciousness, and it consists mostly of a single long sentence that sets out the thoughts of its narrator as they occur to her.

The narrator is a middle-aged woman who lives in Newcomerstown, Ohio. She is married, has four children, and used to teach history as an adjunct at a college before she gave it up to recover from cancer treatment; she also had a heart defect as a child. She spends most of her time looking after the children and making pies and other baked goods, which she sells to local restaurants and shops to help with the family's finances.

What goes through her mind is a mixture of the ordinary and the very large. She worries about the world of distraction and invented fact she is living in, about what has been put into the rivers by the chemical company, about the factory farm down the interstate, and about what was done to the people who were on the land first.

The phrase the fact that appears in the book more than nineteen thousand times. It won the Goldsmiths Prize in 2019 and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize of the same year.