The Elusive Language of Ducks

Description

Title: The Elusive Language of Ducks

Author: Judith White

Publisher: Random House New Zealand (Vintage), 2013

Format: Paperback

Condition: Very Good

Description:

Hannah’s mother has just died and someone has brought her a duckling to make up for it. They were well-meaning. They had no idea what they were starting.

The duckling grows into a Muscovy duck named Ducko, and Ducko grows into the centre of Hannah’s life. She feeds it squashed snails and dandelion leaves. She carries it round the house. She lets it sleep in the crook of her arm. Her husband Simon, who brought the duck home in the first place, watches this happen with the dawning understanding that he cannot compete. Running alongside Hannah and Ducko’s story is the story of Toby — Simon’s colleague, a man in the grip of heroin — and the question of whether any of them are going to come through.

The Elusive Language of Ducks is, underneath its duck, a novel about what grief does to people — the gaps it opens up and the strange things we send in to fill them. It is also, with perfect timing, very funny. The NZ Herald called it “wry and clever” and said it “transcends its bleak theme to leave us as thoughtful and questioning as its gentle protagonist.” The Herald on Sunday called it “writing to savour.” The Landfall Review placed it in the company of Gallico’s The Snow Goose as a fable about the bonds between humans and animals.

Judith White won the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Centenary Award and two Sargeson Fellowships. Michael King called her writing “vividly and hauntingly original.” This is her second novel. It was published in New Zealand, the UK, and the United States.

Why We Stock It:

One of those books that sounds like a gentle story about a duck and turns out to be an exact portrait of grief, dependency, and the particular distance that opens up inside a marriage when one person is drowning and the other cannot reach them. Auckland domestic life rendered in precise, compassionate prose.