The Shipping News

The Shipping News is a novel by the American writer E. Annie Proulx, published in 1993. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award, and it was adapted for film in 2001.

Quoyle is a large, awkward man who has spent his life being treated as a disappointment, first by his parents and then by his wife, Petal. When his parents die and Petal is killed in an accident, he has nothing left except his two young daughters, and his father's sister, Agnis Hamm, tells him about the family's abandoned house on the coast of Newfoundland. They move north, and Quoyle takes a job at the Gammy Bird, the local newspaper in Killick-Claw, where the editor assigns him the traffic accidents and the shipping news, the record of which ships have arrived and departed. The work gives him a trade and a place, and the book follows him as he learns the town, the weather and the family history he had never been told.

Proulx writes the Newfoundland of the novel in its own vocabulary, with chapters headed by entries from a nautical dictionary, and Quoyle's slow accumulation of competence rather than any single dramatic event carries the story.