This 1,000-Page Novel Is Just One Sentence - And It Won a Major Award
Most novels come with chapters, paragraph breaks, and, well, many, many sentences. Ducks, Newburyport offers none of that, and judges at one of fiction's most prestigious prizes called it a masterpiece anyway.
Lucy Ellmann's Ducks, Newburyport, a novel of more than 1,000 pages written mostly in a single sentence, won the 2019 Goldsmiths Prize, a British literary award given annually to fiction that 'breaks the mold or extends the possibilities of the novel form.'
The novel's main character is an unnamed middle-aged woman who lives in Newcomerstown, Ohio. What unfolds is a stream-of-consciousness meditation on life, memory, motherhood, and the randomness of everyday experience, captured as she bakes pies in her kitchen. The stream of thought pulls in everything from shopping lists and parenting anxieties to climate change and gun culture, building up over 1,000 pages.
The continuous stream-of-consciousness is interrupted only by short episodes involving a mountain lioness and her cubs, told by a separate narrator. These interludes use more conventional narrative structure, with multiple sentences and a focused story. The lioness roams West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio searching for her cubs after they are taken by humans.
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Judges chair Erica Wagnercalled the novel 'that rare thing: a book which, not long after its publication, one can unhesitatingly call a masterpiece,' saying Ellmann 'remakes the novel and expands the reader's idea of what is possible with the form.'
Accepting the award, which comes with a cash prize, Ellmann said, 'It's a lot of money for one sentence and it may make me write a few more.' You have to love that level of wit.
The book's publishing journey was also unconventional. It was published by Galley Beggar Press in Norwich, England after being rejected by Ellmann's regular publisher, Bloomsbury. North American publishing rights were acquired by Windsor, Canada-based Biblioasis.
Ducks, Newburyport was also shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize, the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, and the Saltire Prize, and went on to win the 2020 James Tait Black Prize.
Ellmann was born in Illinois and moved to England as a teenager. She lives in Edinburgh. Her debut novel, Sweet Desserts, won the Guardian Fiction Prize.
For readers who've powered through long 'realist' novels before, like Infinite Jest or Anna Kareninas, Ducks, Newburyport still presents something genuinely different. The meandering length itself seems to be part of the book's whole point.
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This story was originally published April 16, 2026 at 11:11 AM.