Recommendations
Books Like The Shipping News by Annie Proulx
For readers of the great Newfoundland redemption novel
If you loved The Shipping News — Quoyle's transformation in Newfoundland, Proulx's compressed syntactic style, the Ashley Book of Knots chapter headings, the specific texture of outport life — these novels share the same qualities: place as the medium of transformation, distinctive prose, and the slow recovery of people who have been broken.
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Buy on AmazonPostcards
by Annie Proulx
Proulx's debut novel — the companion in her American landscape fiction; where The Shipping News is about arrival and the possibility of staying, Postcards is about flight; both are place-rooted novels in the distinctive Proulx mode.
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Buy on AmazonAccordion Crimes
by Annie Proulx
Proulx's third novel — the companion in her major fiction; where The Shipping News is concentrated on one place and one character's transformation, Accordion Crimes is broad and episodic; both show the range of Proulx's ambition.
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Buy on AmazonCold Mountain
by Charles Frazier
Frazier's National Book Award-winning novel — the companion in American fiction about a specific landscape and a man's journey through it; Inman's North Carolina mountains are the Southern version of Quoyle's Newfoundland — both places that transform the people who pass through them.
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Buy on AmazonPlainsong
by Kent Haruf
Haruf's novel about a small Colorado plains town — the companion in the tradition of American fiction rooted in a specific landscape; Holt's quiet people are the plains version of Killick-Claw's outport community; both novels find dignity in very particular, ordinary American places.
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Buy on AmazonHousekeeping
by Marilynne Robinson
Robinson's debut novel — the companion in American fiction with a distinctive, heightened prose style rooted in a specific landscape; Ruth's Idaho and Sylvie's transience are the earlier literary version of what Proulx is doing with Quoyle's Newfoundland transformation.
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Buy on AmazonThe Stone Diaries
by Carol Shields
Shields's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel — the Canadian companion in literary fiction about ordinary lives; Daisy Goodwill's story across a century is the more formally inventive version of the Proulx project — the extraordinary found in ordinary lives in specific North American places.
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Buy on AmazonOlive Kitteridge
by Elizabeth Strout
Strout's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel in stories — the Maine coastal companion to Proulx's Newfoundland; Olive Kitteridge's coastal Maine community is the most closely related American fictional place to Killick-Claw, and Strout's compressed, specific prose is the closest American contemporary style to Proulx's.
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Buy on AmazonThe Bone People
by Keri Hulme
Hulme's Booker Prize-winning novel — the New Zealand companion in fiction about damaged people finding each other in a specific, remote coastal landscape; Kerewin Holmes's isolation on the New Zealand coast is the Pacific version of what Quoyle's Newfoundland represents.
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