What I’m Reading: “The Shipping News” by Annie Proulx

The Shipping News was first published in 1993 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1994. It was made into a film in 2001, starring Kevin Spacey, Julianne Moore, and Judi Dench as “the aunt.”

The story centres on Quoyle, who is called only by his surname throughout the book and is the despised younger son of an expatriate Newfoundland family living in the United States. Friendless except for the chance-met Partridge, Quoyle lurches from debacle to disaster in a life distinguished only by in...