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·普魯（1935—）是當代美國文壇一位令人矚目的作傢。她齣生於康涅狄格州。自八十年代末開始，陸續創作瞭《心靈之歌及其他》（1988）、《明信片》（1992）《船訊》（1993）、《手風琴罪行錄》（1996）、《近距離：懷俄故事集》（1999）、《老謀深算》（2002）和《髒泥：懷俄明故事集II》（2004）等作品。 其中，短篇小說《斷背山》被李安搬上銀幕，感動瞭億萬觀眾。 文學界對安妮·普魯給予瞭普遍的認可，她獲得瞭美國幾乎所有重要的文學奬項，她普利策奬、國傢圖書奬、福剋納奬和薇拉文學奬等。 《船訊》（又譯《航運新聞》）是安妮·普魯最富激情的一部長篇小說，曾獲1993年美國國傢圖書奬和1994年普利策小說奬等多項大奬，並於2001年被仔萊塢搬上銀幕，由凱文·斯派西和硃麗安·摩爾聯袂主演。