From Powells.com
Discover the books that made our 2022 list.
Staff Pick
God, the language in this book is worth luxuriating in. Lungfish is the debut novel from Meghan Gilliss, a promising author who’s also worked as a bookseller and a librarian, something that feels reflected in the deeply considered way she layers words and stories. The novel’s protagonist, Tuck, is a mother who finds herself essentially squatting in an old family home on an island in Maine, left with little-to-no money to feed herself, her young kid, and her husband, who is in the midst of intense opioid withdrawal. Their life is a day-to-day, visceral struggle, as Tuck works to find spare change, extra crackers, and any fleeting threads of hope. The story may feel occasionally bleak, but it is always loving and thoughtful and surrounded by a beautifully rendered, vivid landscape. Recommended By Kelsey F., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Longlisted for The Center for Fiction 2022 First Novel Prize
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.
Review
"Lungfish offers up journeys physical and psychic, so it's fitting that it takes place on an island, which is a transitional place. It's about families, past and present, and the lifelines they provide, along with their often tangled confusions. The revelations about the natural world are wonderful, and give a sense of what endures." — Ann Beattie
Review
"Gilliss is an extraordinary writer; passages of the novel read like poetry, and others read like a lyric essay......As startling and intense as the windswept landscape the book depicts." — Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
Review
"Gilliss' debut novel paints an aching picture of life at the fringes of American society." — Booklist (Starred Review)
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.