Lungfish -- Meghan Gilliss - Hardcover

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.

Author: Meghan Gilliss
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 09/13/2022
Pages: 320
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.15lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.60w x 1.10d
ISBN: 9781646220915

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 04/01/2022 pg. 4
Publishers Weekly 05/16/2022
Kirkus Reviews 08/01/2022
Booklist 08/01/2022 pg. 21