OverDrive would like to use cookies to store information on your computer to improve your user experience at our Website. One of the cookies we use is critical for certain aspects of the site to operate and has already been set. You may delete and block all cookies from this site, but this could affect certain features or services of the site. To find out more about the cookies we use and how to delete them, click here to see our Privacy Policy.
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Longlisted for The Center for Fiction 2022 First Novel Prize Finalist for the Maine Literary Award for Fiction "Lungfish is a force of nature—a deeply felt marvel of a book that navigates grief, parenthood, and the mysteries of family with unrelenting power and precision. Here is a story about the islands we build and carry with us. Here is storytelling at its best." —Paul Yoon, author of Snow Hunters and Run Me to Earth 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.
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Longlisted for The Center for Fiction 2022 First Novel Prize Finalist for the Maine Literary Award for Fiction "Lungfish is a force of nature—a deeply felt marvel of a book that navigates grief, parenthood, and the mysteries of family with unrelenting power and precision. Here is a story about the islands we build and carry with us. Here is storytelling at its best." —Paul Yoon, author of Snow Hunters and Run Me to Earth 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.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
About the Author-
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-
April 1, 2022
From Pushcart and Glimmer Train nominee Gilliss, this debut features a couple driven by debts from the husband's addiction to hide away on a deserted island off the coast of Maine, where they live illegally while trying to scrape together enough money to depart before the winter snows--or maybe the police--arrive. With the husband attempting to detox, the story is essentially the wife's, following her as she tends to their daughter, forages for berries and mussels, and struggles with the vast emptiness within and without.
Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
May 16, 2022 Gilliss debuts with a pungent and riveting story set on a tiny, isolated Maine island. After Tuck’s grandmother dies, the family’s island house is left to her father, but he’s been missing ever since Tuck was in high school. Tuck’s family desperately needs a change from their “strange, failed home” in Pittsburgh, so she surreptitiously moves to the island with her husband, Paul, and her young daughter, Agnes. Once they arrive, Paul, who is addicted to kratom, an opioid herbal extract, goes through an excruciating detox. When he’s mobile, money disappears; when he isn’t, there isn’t enough food or gas, and the mainland is only accessible by boat. In memorable sequences, Tuck and Agnes forage for sustenance, stretching their diets over the summer to accommodate little more than seaweed and mussels (when Tuck throws a starfish back in the water, Agnes screams in hunger). Tuck also makes a bit of money by designing and printing comical bumper stickers, which she sells on the mainland. As she puts off telling the pesky executor about her father’s long-ago disappearance, she wonders if the family could make a go of it through the winter. Gilliss shines with a lyrical style and bold, fragmented structure, as Tuck’s frequent meditations on lungfish, which can go without food for three years and survive in “the hardest place, the intertidal zone,” contrast with her own predicament. Indeed, Tuck’s resilience makes her an indelible creation. Out of a tangible sense of desperation, Gilliss produces a triumph.
Starred review from August 1, 2022 A young family in crisis returns to an isolated family property in an attempt to survive. Tuck's grandmother is dead, and Tuck knows she left her house--"halfway out to sea" on a tiny island in the Gulf of Maine--to Tuck's father in her will. The problem is that Tuck's father is missing and has been for years, having struck out for Mexico when Tuck and her brother were just teens growing up in Indiana. The other problem is that Tuck's life in Pittsburgh has fallen apart. She's disoriented by new motherhood, and, worse, her husband, Paul, is disappearing for long stretches at a time and draining their finances. Soon, they have no choice but to load up their Volvo with their toddler daughter, Agnes, and the meager possessions remaining to them and squat at the Maine property, hoping to stay one step ahead of the executor of Tuck's grandmother's will, who is searching for the rightful next of kin, Tuck's dad. Soon after arriving on the island, Tuck learns Paul's secret: He is addicted to kratom, an herbal extract that mimics opioids. While Tuck does everything she can think of to keep herself and Agnes alive, including foraging seaweed, mushrooms, and mussels from the beach, the threads of her past and present tangle in increasingly dire ways. Gilliss is an extraordinary writer; passages of her debut novel read like poetry, and others read like a lyric essay, making use of surprising juxtaposition and associations, especially ones--lobster, lungfish--that derive from the harsh setting in which Tuck finds herself. With some writers, such style can disguise plot weaknesses, but Gilliss sidesteps that, too: The peril the family is in keeps the pages flying. As startling and intense as the windswept landscape the book depicts.
COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Starred review from August 1, 2022 Circumstances have pushed Tuck, Paul, and their daughter, Agnes, to the point of mere existence. Wrung dry by hunger, they live on a remote island in the Gulf of Maine, squatters in a house passed down to Tuck's father by her grandmother. Compounding matters is Paul's recovery from drug addiction and his insensitivity to his young family's needs. Tuck's traumatic childhood--abandoned by their parents, Tuck and her brother stitched together odd jobs to make ends meet--also casts a long shadow over her present circumstances. Narrated by Tuck, Gilliss' debut novel paints an aching picture of life at the fringes of American society, capturing a pain that is nearly tearing the family apart. The hallucinatory and poetic prose, including gorgeous descriptions of the island's natural beauty, feels right for a woman who is consumed with hunger not only for food but also for a semblance of normalcy and love. "Elsewhere in the world, lungfish survive droughts by coating themselves in mud and sinking deep into sleep," Tuck points out. Survival strategies for humans are a lot more complicated. When society has passed you by, when you have to boil kelp for sustenance, every lived moment is a lesson in how to stay alive.
COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Title Information+
Publisher
Catapult
OverDrive Read
Release date:
EPUB eBook
Release date:
Digital Rights Information+
Copyright Protection (DRM) required by the Publisher may be applied to this title to limit or prohibit printing or copying. File sharing or redistribution is prohibited. Your rights to access this material expire at the end of the lending period. Please see Important Notice about Copyrighted Materials for terms applicable to this content.
Please update to the latest version of the OverDrive app to stream videos.
Device Compatibility Notice
The OverDrive app is required for this format on your current device.
Bahrain, Egypt, Hong Kong, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, the Syrian Arab Republic, Tunisia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen
You've reached your library's checkout limit for digital titles.
To make room for more checkouts, you may be able to return titles from your Checkouts page.
Excessive Checkout Limit Reached.
There have been too many titles checked out and returned by your account within a short period of time.
Try again in several days. If you are still not able to check out titles after 7 days, please contact Support.
You have already checked out this title. To access it, return to your Checkouts page.
This title is not available for your card type. If you think this is an error contact support.
There are no copies of this issue left to borrow. Please try to borrow this title again when a new issue is released.
| Sign In
You will be prompted to sign into your library account on the next page.
If this is your first time selecting “Send to NOOK,” you will then be taken to a Barnes & Noble page to sign into (or create) your NOOK account. You should only have to sign into your NOOK account once to link it to your library account. After this one-time step, periodicals will be automatically sent to your NOOK account when you select "Send to NOOK."
The first time you select “Send to NOOK,” you will be taken to a Barnes & Noble page to sign into (or create) your NOOK account. You should only have to sign into your NOOK account once to link it to your library account. After this one-time step, periodicals will be automatically sent to your NOOK account when you select "Send to NOOK."
You can read periodicals on any NOOK tablet or in the free NOOK reading app for iOS, Android or Windows 8.