Here is a brief descripition of the book from Borders:


The Shipping News
Trade Paperback, 352 Pages, Simon & Schuster Trade Paperbacks, June 1994
ISBN: 0671510053
Author: Proulx, Annie

Description: E. Annie Proulx focuses on a Newfoundland fishing town in a tale about a third-rate newspaperman and the women in his life-- his elderly aunt and two young daughters-- who decide to resettle in their ancestral seaside home. The transformation each of the character undergoes following move is profound. A vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the contemporary American family, "The Shipping News" enlightens readers to the powers of E. Annie Proulx's storytelling genius and her expert evocation of time and place. She is truly one of the most gifted and original writers in America today.




Here is the description from Barnes and Noble:



Synopsis
The protagonist of this novel is a journalist whose wife has been killed with a lover in an automobile accident, leaving him with two small daughters. Quoyle is "the son of immigrant parents from Newfoundland. . . . An aunt appears, . . . proposing that she, Quoyle, and the girls . . . return to the old family base and make —or try to make — a living on Quoyle's Point, Capsize Cove, about two miles across the water from Killick-Claw (population 2,000), where the weekly paper needs somebody to cover shipping news. . . . Quoyle surprises himself by doing well at the Gammy Bird. As he learns the local ropes, . . . he learns things he never suspected about his forebears." (Atlantic Monthly)



Annotation
The highly acclaimed author of Postcards shifts her focus from literary criticism to a fishing town in Newfoundland, in a tale about a third-rate newspaperman and the women in his life — an elderly aunt and two young daughters — who undergo striking changes when they decide to resettle in their ancestral coastal home.



Description from The Reader's Catalog
Winner of the National Book Award for 1993, as well as the Pulitzer Prize for 1994. Quoyle, a second-rate journalist, moves with his two daughters back to his "home country" of Newfoundland.



From the Publisher
E. Annie Proulx focuses on a Newfoundland fishing town in a tale about a third-rate newspaperman and the women in his life-- his elderly aunt and two young daughters-- who decide to resettle in their ancestral seaside home. The transformation each of the character undergoes following move is profound. A vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the contemporary American family, "The Shipping News" enlightens readers to the powers of E. Annie Proulx's storytelling genius and her expert evocation of time and place. She is truly one of the most gifted and original writers in America today.



From the Critics
From BookList
It is a testament to Proulx's unique storytelling skills that this tale of a miserable family opting to start a new life in a miserable Newfoundland fishing village has an enchanted, fairy-tale quality, despite its harrowing details of various abuses. It is also very funny. Big, big-hearted Quoyle, with his "great damp loaf of a body," is the unlikely protagonist who has never done anything right and who doesn't recognize love unless it brings pain and misery. Raging strumpet Petal Bear, Quoyle's beloved and oft-forgiven wife, is the fulcrum of his misery. When Petal's flame burns out (shortly after selling their kids, Sunshine and Bunny, to a child pornographer), Quoyle is set in motion, if not exactly free just yet. Along with his elderly aunt, her toothless dog Warren, and his rescued offspring, he heads north for his godforsaken ancestral home to take a job on a nasty little newspaper that features car wrecks, sexual-abuse stories, and giant fake ads. Proulx creates an amazing world in Killick-Claw, Newfoundland — a cold, rocky place that nevertheless is populated by a fascinating variety of big-hearted, unlikely heroes who are revealed to have all manner of special talents. Quoyle and company, who have never belonged anywhere, gradually fit right in.

From Library Journal - Ann H. Fisher, Radford Public Library, VA
Off the beaten track of contemporary American fiction in both style and setting, this remarkable second novel by the author of Postcards ( LJ 12/1/91) should capture the attention of readers and critics. Huge, homely Quoyle works off and on for a newspaper. His cheating wife Petal is killed in a car crash while abandoning him and their two preschool daughters. Wallowing in grief, Quoyle agrees to accompany his elderly aunt and resettle in a remote Newfoundland fishing village. Memorable characters — gay aunt Agnis, difficult daughter Bunny, new love interest Wavey, many colorful locals in their new hometown — combine with dark stories of the Quoyle family's past and the staccato, often subjectless or verbless sentences (bound to make English teachers cringe) to create a powerful whole. For most fiction collections.

From The Boston Globe
The Shipping News is alive in every sinse of the word...Proulx has George Eliot's gift of loving observation — her vision is wise and generous.

From Howard Norman - The New York Times Book Review
Throughout The Shipping News, the sinuousness of E. Annie Proulx's prose seems to correspond physically with the textures of the weather and sea. Her inventive language is finely, if exhaustively, accomplished. If I have any complaint it is that at times she carries her own brand of poetic compression too far: 'Billy's worn shape down to the bones, cast Quoyle as a sliding mass.' Weather offshore or overland can often seem chokingly imbued with portentousness. Near the novel's end, Jack Buggit sits up in his own coffin, spouting water, having both drowned and not drowned; it is a forced invention in a novel otherwise replete with wonderfully natural ones. Ms. Proulx is never too showy with her research, though The Shipping News is almost an encyclopedia of slang and lore. The way her Newfoundlanders talk, the most factual account seems as high-spirited as gossip over a supper of snow crab, cod cheeks, lobster salad and seal-flipper stew.

From Phoebe-Lou Adams - The Atlantic
Ms. Proulx blends Newfoundland argot, savage history, impressively diverse characters, fine descriptions of weather and scenery, and comic horseplay without ever lessening the reader's interest in Quoyle's progress from bumbling outsider to capable journalist. He will never advance to The New York Times, but why should he wish to? Killick-Claw may be a small world, but, thanks to Ms. Proulx, it is a real and fascinating one.

Vicki
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