Lucy Ellmann crafts narratives that delve into the complexities of human relationships and the inner lives of her characters. Her prose is marked by a sharp observational talent, skillfully employing language to explore profound emotional landscapes. Ellmann's work often grapples with themes of family, identity, and the search for meaning in contemporary existence. She offers readers a deeply insightful and often challenging perspective on the human condition.
THINGS ARE AGAINST US is the first collection of essays from Booker Prize-shortlisted author Lucy Ellmann. Provocative, smart, angry, wise, and very, very funny, the essays in Things Are Against Us cover everything - from feminism to environmental catastrophe; labour strikes to sex strikes; Little House On The Prairie to Donald Trump. These are essays bursting with energy, and reading them feels like sticking your hand in the mains socket.
By the author of Ducks, Newburyport, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2019 and the Goldsmiths Prize 'Shrewd, passionate, outrageous and very, very funny' Sunday Times Dot used to think she was perfect, with her pointy nose, pink skin and blonde hair. But now she lives on Abalone Avenue with a husband who chases women and swordfish. And she has a rather icky Fatal Flaw. And the universe doesn't give a damn! So DOT decides to End It All. Will death be fast? Slow? EMBARRASING? But despite her valiant suicide by tea cosy followed by a jaunt to the morgue, DOT wakes up...
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.
By the author of Ducks, Newburyport, shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2019, the Saltire Fiction Book of the Year Award and the Goldsmiths Prize 'Bold ... Wonderful' Sunday Times 'Hilarious ... Razor-sharp wit' Cosmopolitan Eloise is too old to be called an orphan but insists she is bereft. With a cello, a car, some cats and a supply of Chicken Balti, she has devised for herself a half-alive hermitude. From her sinister country cottage she dispatches plaintive missives to the purveyors of evaporated milk and loo-roll holders. No one is too high, too powerful, to escape the fury of her attack. George is England's only poet of ice hockey (not a full-time job). Pining for inspiration, he plays a lot of pinball and is chased around by his students. Indeed, all through the land people languish in a rage of bewilderment, undone by neighbours, the news and the heartless human tendancy to reduce the world to lists. Fierce, funny and strange (touching on the unseen links between donkeys, fruit-labelling and ferry disasters) Lucy Ellmann's third novel reveals the stubborn nature of absurdity. Man or Mango? wanders through the darkest areas of human behaviour, and our century's history, asking how to live - and how to love.
It's Christmas Eve in Manhattan. Harrison Hanafan, noted plastic surgeon, falls on his ass. So far, so good. 'Ya can't sit there all day, buddy, looking up people's skirts!' chides a weird gal in a coat like a duvet - Mimi! She kindly conjures for him the miracle of a taxi. Recuperating in his apartment with Schubert, Bette Davis, and a foundling cat, Harrison adds items to his life's work, a List of Melancholy Things (Walmart, puppetry, Velcro, whale eyes, shrimp-eating contests...). But when he receives a dreaded invitation to address his old school, Mimi reappears, with all her curves and chaos. She and Harrison fall emphatically in love. And, as their love-making reaches a whole new kind of climax, the sweet smell of revolution is in the air.
The tranquillity of a rural backwater - SHATTERED! The ancient arts of medicine - EXPOSED! Her darling cleft-chinned doctor - FORCED TO FIGHT FOR HIS LIFE! It was a time of wiping. A time of bandaging. Of patients and their incessant needs. In a world where nurses never wash their hands, and doctors are the lowest of the low, one enormous nurse stands up for LOVE - a nurse that will make you fart with fear...
By the author of Ducks, Newburyport, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2019 and the Goldsmiths Prize In an eminent London art institute - the Catafalque - Our Heroine Isabel (she of the obsessional habits, perpetual virginity and peculiar belly button) sit in wistful contemplation of Chardin's brushstrokes and the virile red socks of passing lecturers. Isabel's wholly imaginary love life (based on the romantic notions of authoress Babs Cartwheel) bears little resemblance to that of her flatmate Pol, who prefers to grip reality by the balls. Enter Robert, victim of an American childhood, kitsch memorabilia, academic rivalry, Pol's belly-dancing and Isabel's mute adoration. Can he be perverse enough not to despair?
Suzy Schwarz has learnt one or two things about life: other people know how you should live better than you do; sisters (especially Fran) can destroy your sanity and self-esteem; lust calls for careful timing because it rarely coincides with that of your partner; and most heartbreaking of all, parents die on you, leaving you grieving. The only thing that provides constant solace when times are bad (and they usually are) is food.