‘Surreal immediacy’: how a 1,000-page novel became a 45-hour audiobook
Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport has attracted much attention for its length, but one publisher believes the spoken word might be its perfect medium
Finishing a good book should leave you feeling bereft for a little while, but it’s rare to leave a novel with your brain vibrating at a different frequency. After I finished Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport – a single-sentence stream of consciousness set entirely within the mind of an Ohio housewife – I experienced a comedown. Her unnamed protagonist starts every new thought with “the fact that”, a banal phrase that felt like an exposed secret whenever I spotted it in the wild. Scrolling through examples of the clickbait that litter her thoughts (“Dog Sees Himself On TV And Freaks Out”), absurdist headlines took on a new profundity. When I finished it, I missed her.
It’s one thing to read Ellmann’s 1,030-page novel; it’s another to read it aloud. When tiny press Galley Beggar signed Ducks, Newburyport, they didn’t give much thought to an audiobook, says co-founder Sam Jordison. It still didn’t have an audio publisher when it was nominated for the 2019 Booker prize – but as the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) makes all shortlisted titles available to members of its library, it commissioned US actor Stephanie Ellyne to tackle the challenge.
