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. It's also very, very funny. "A 900-page novel in a single sentence? If that sounds like your kind of thing (and if it does, I like you already), then look out for Ducks, Newburyport, a wildly ambitious and righteously angry portrait of contemporary America." —OBSERVER FICTION PICKS, 2019...

There are three forms of strike I'd recommend: a housework strike, a labour strike, and a sex strike. I can't wait for the first two.The first collection of essays from Lucy Ellmann, Things Are Against Us is everything you might expect from such a fiery writer—which is to say, entirely unexpected.Bold, angry, despairing and very, very funny, these essays cover everything from matriarchy to environmental catastrophe to Little House on the Prairie to Agatha Christie. Ellmann calls for a moratorium on air travel, rails against bras, and pleads for sanity in a world that—well, a world that spent four years in the company of Donald Trump, that 'tremendously sick, terrible, nasty, lowly, truly pathetic, reckless, sad, weak, lazy, incompetent, third-rate, clueless, not smart, dumb as a rock, all talk, wacko, zero-chance lying liar'.Things Are Against Us is electric. It's vital. These are essays bursting with energy. Reading them...

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.

It's Christmas Eve in Manhattan. An eminent plastic surgeon slips on the ice, lands on his butt, and sprains his ankle. So far, so good. A woman such as he's never known yanks him to his feet and conjures the miracle of a taxi. Harrison recuperates with Franz Schubert, Bette Davis, and a foundling cat. Then it's back to rhinoplasties, liposuction, and the peccadilloes of his obnoxious colleagues. It is only when he collides again with that strangely helpful woman that things take a wild and revolutionary turn. Sparkling, polemical, irreverent, slippery, and sexy, Mimi is a love story, a call to arms, and Lucy Ellmann's most tender and dazzling book. It's also the feminist novel of the century. (So far.)

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...

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?

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...

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...