Lungfish

by Meghan Gilliss Narrated by Devon Sorvari

Overview

Longlisted for The Center for Fiction 2022 First Novel Prize



Tuck is slow to understand the circumstances that have driven her family to an uninhabited island off the coast of Maine, the former home of her deceased grandmother where she once spent her childhood summers. Squatting there now, she must care for her spirited young daughter and scrape together enough money to leave before winter arrives-or before they are found out.



Relying on the island for sustenance and answers-bladderwrack, rosehips, tenacious little green crabs; smells held by the damp walls of the house, field guides and religious texts, a failed invention left behind by her missing father-Tuck lives moment-by-moment through the absurdity, beauty, paranoia, and hunger that shoots through her life, as her husband struggles to detox.



Exquisitely written and formally daring, Lungfish tells the story of a woman grappling through the lies she has been told-and those she has told herself-to arrive at the truth of who she is and where she must go. Meghan Gilliss's debut is a brilliant and heartbreaking novel about addiction, doubt, marriage, motherhood, and learning to see in the dark.

Editorial Reviews

OCTOBER 2022 - AudioFile

Devon Sorvari gives a stunning performance of this timely and powerfully affecting audiobook about a young family in dire circumstances. Tuck; her husband, Paul; and their young daughter, Agnes, squat in her late grandmother's home on a remote Maine island, which has been willed to Tuck's long absent father. The family's meager funds are being depleted by Paul, who is addicted to an herbal opiate, and the family receives little help from social services. Sorvari wonderfully mines the resilience and bravery of the one-of-a-kind Tuck, who forages for seaweed to feed her daughter as she struggles to keep her family going. Sorvari imbues the novel’s precise and poetic language with emotion and urgency, creating a hypnotic listening experience. This provocative and harrowing audiobook is essential listening. M.J. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

|Los Angeles Times

Gilliss imbues every page with the ache and uncertainty of trying to give a child small pockets of joy under near impossible circumstances…while also managing to immerse the reader fully in the textures, tastes and sounds of the Maine coast.”

OCTOBER 2022 - AudioFile

Devon Sorvari gives a stunning performance of this timely and powerfully affecting audiobook about a young family in dire circumstances. Tuck; her husband, Paul; and their young daughter, Agnes, squat in her late grandmother's home on a remote Maine island, which has been willed to Tuck's long absent father. The family's meager funds are being depleted by Paul, who is addicted to an herbal opiate, and the family receives little help from social services. Sorvari wonderfully mines the resilience and bravery of the one-of-a-kind Tuck, who forages for seaweed to feed her daughter as she struggles to keep her family going. Sorvari imbues the novel’s precise and poetic language with emotion and urgency, creating a hypnotic listening experience. This provocative and harrowing audiobook is essential listening. M.J. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940174995147
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	09/27/2022
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	1,160,367

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