Lungfish, Meghan Gilliss
Lungfish, Meghan Gilliss
List: $15.99 | Sale: $11.20
Club: $7.99

Lungfish

Author: Meghan Gilliss

Narrator: Devon Sorvari

Unabridged: 6 hr 4 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/27/2022

Categories: Fiction, Family Life, Nature


Synopsis

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.

About Meghan Gilliss

Meghan Gilliss attended the Bennington Writing Seminars and is a fellow of the Hewnoaks Artist Residency. She has worked as a journalist, a bookseller, a librarian, and a hospital worker, and lives in Portland, Maine. Lungfish is her first novel.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Will

…lungfish survive droughts by coating themselves in mud and sinking deep into sleep, the mud hardening and cracking in the sun until finally water returns and sets everything loose again, brings movement back to earth, and fish. Lungfish can go three and a half years without food.---------------......more

Goodreads review by Candi

Ugh. The blurb for this compares it to Marilynne Robinson’s writing (well, to be fair, “for readers of” Robinson, as well as a couple others I’ve not yet read.) I’ve had the pleasure of reading several of Robinson’s novels, and I can’t see the similarity here at all. Stylistically this was completel......more

Goodreads review by Lark

A novel about the ravages of addiction that is told in a way that felt uniquely poetic and yet so grounded in the actual experience--a near-perfect fictional representation of the end of love and hope that comes when you realize your loved one will tell any lie, and suffer any degradation, and leave......more

Goodreads review by Adam

Creative, experimental, beautifully structured, and moving - one to watch......more

Goodreads review by Laura

I should have known. I didn't like the cover or the title of Lungfish but it was recommended and had decent reviews. I found Lungfish to be melancholy and perpetually caliginous. For me, it was as though Meghan Gilliss was given an assignment to write a novel that feels like unrelenting fog. Everyth......more