Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, "The Shipping News" is a celebration of Annie Proulx's genius for storytelling and her vigorous contribution to the art of the novel.Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a "head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair...features as bunched as kissed fingertips," is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing wife meets her just deserts. An aunt convinces Quoyle and his two emotionally disturbed daughters to return with her to the starkly beautiful coastal landscape of their ancestral home in Newfoundland. Here, on desolate Quoyle's Point, in a house empty except for a few mementos of the family's unsavory past, the battered members of three generations try to cobble up new lives.Newfoundland is a country of coast and cove where the mercury rarely rises above 70 degrees, the local culinary delicacy is cod cheeks, and it's easier to travel by boat and snowmobile than on anything with wheels. In this harsh place of cruel storms, a collapsing fishery, and chronic unemployment, the aunt sets up as a yacht upholsterer in nearby Killick-Claw, and Quoyle finds a job reporting the shipping news for the local weekly, the "Gammy Bird" (a paper that specializes in sexual-abuse stories and grisly photos of car accidents).As the long winter closes its jaws of ice, each of the Quoyles confronts private demons, reels from catastrophe to minor triumph -- in the company of the obsequious Mavis Bangs; Diddy Shovel the strongman; drowned Herald Prowse; cane-twirling Beety; Nutbeem, who steals foreign news from the radio; a demented cousin the aunt refuses to recognize; the much-zippered Alvin Yark; silent Wavey; and old Billy Pretty, with his bag of secrets. By the time of the spring storms Quoyle has learned how to gut cod, to escape from a pickle jar, and to tie a true lover's knot.

安妮·普鲁（1935—）是当代美国文坛一位令人瞩目的作家。她出生于康涅狄格州。自八十年代末开始，陆续创作了《心灵之歌及其他》（1988）、《明信片》（1992）《船讯》（1993）、《手风琴罪行录》（1996）、《近距离：怀俄故事集》（1999）、《老谋深算》（2002）和《脏泥：怀俄明故事集II》（2004）等作品。 其中，短篇小说《断背山》被李安搬上银幕，感动了亿万观众。 文学界对安妮·普鲁给予了普遍的认可，她获得了美国几乎所有重要的文学奖项，她普利策奖、国家图书奖、福克纳奖和薇拉文学奖等。 《船讯》（又译《航运新闻》）是安妮·普鲁最富激情的一部长篇小说，曾获1993年美国国家图书奖和1994年普利策小说奖等多项大奖，并于2001年被仔莱坞搬上银幕，由凯文·斯派西和朱丽安·摩尔联袂主演。