Lungfish: A Novel

For readers of Jenny Offill, Marilynne Robinson, and Claire-Louise Bennett, Lungfish is the shimmering and suspenseful story of a mother pushed to the edge by unseen forces as she and her family find themselves squatting on an otherwise uninhabited island off the coast of Maine

Tuck is a woman whose husband's addiction has drained their finances and driven them to move illegally to an abandoned island off the coast of Maine. There, she must care for their young daughter and scrape together enough money to leave before winter arrives--or before they are found out--while her husband struggles to detox.

Tuck finds herself at the mercy of what the island has to offer for sustenance and answers (little green crabs, bladderwrack, rosehip tea; notes scrawled out by her grandmother, smells held by the damp walls of the house, a failed invention left behind by her missing father)--living moment-by-moment through the absurdity, beauty, paranoia, and hunger that shoots through her life.

With exquisite prose that is displacing and even transformative, Lungfish explores the wild, unknown spaces of what makes a family, and the darkness that must be grappled through to find a way out. Meghan Gilliss' debut is a brilliant and heartbreaking novel about addiction, doubt, marriage, motherhood, and the ground that is ever-shifting beneath our feet.