Booker novel written in a single sentence

IF YOU’RE looking for a long read, the Booker Prize has just the thing.

Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport, one of 13 novels in the running for the literary award, consists of a single sentence running over 1,000 pages.

It is the interior monologue of an Ohio housewife ruminating on everything from dinner party menus to the dark side of Trump’s America, a stream-of-consciousness written without paragraphs or full stops.

The 426,100-word sentence is broken only a handful of times, by a parallel story written from the perspective of a mountain lion.

Ellmann’s usual publisher, Bloomsbury, turned down the novel but it was picked up by the comparatively tiny Galley Beggar Press.

The Booker Prize judges called it “extraordinary” and “like nothing you’ve ever read before”. Joanna Macgregor, the conductor, pianist and composer who is serving as one of this year’s judges, said readers should not be put off.

“The thing to know is that it’s extremely funny. So although it looks very dense and worrying on the page, actually every single page is full of puns and jokes. And there is a plot in there.

“You just have to read as much as you can of it and then put it down and come back to it,” she said.

Familiar names on the longlist include Margaret Atwood, Jeanette Winterson and Salman Rushdie. Atwood’s The Testaments is a soon-to-be-published sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, with a plot so secret the judges had to sign a “ferocious” non-disclosure agreement.

The shortlist of six books will be announced on Sept 3 and the winner on Oct 14.

Peter Florence, chairman of the judges, said: “These writers offer joy and hope. Really – read all of them.”