Things Are Against Us

By Lucy Ellmann

From the Booker-shortlisted author of DUCKS, NEWBURYPORT

'Ellmann has long delighted in provocation' ?New Yorker

‘A writer so intelligent and angry’ —Financial Times

Things Are Against Us is the first collection of essays from Booker Prize-shortlisted author Lucy Ellmann. It is everything you might expect from such a fiery writer – which is to say, entirely unexpected. Bold, angry, despairing, and very, very funny, the essays cover everything from matriarchy to environmental catastrophe to Little House on the Prairie. Ellmann calls for a moratorium on air travel – ‘You’d think a global pandemic would be an opportunity to reconsider the whole crazy business.’ She rails against bras – ‘Men have managed to eroticise bras, but THEY DON’T HAVE TO WEAR THEM.’ She gives Agatha Christie a drubbing – ‘atrocious, but ideal for people with colds’. And pleads for sanity in a world that . . . well, a world that has spent four years in the company of Trump – ‘That big, fat loser of a president, that nasty, sick, terrible, lowly, truly pathetic, reckless, sad, weak, lazy, incompetent, third-rate, clueless, not smart, dumb as a rock, all talk, wacko, goofball and all-round low-life . . .’

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan
• Release date: Jul 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9789390742165

Lucy Ellmann

Lucy Ellmann is the author of Ducks, Newburyport, which was shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize, Goldsmiths Prize and Saltire Fiction Book of the Year Award. She was born in Illinois and dragged to England as a teenager. Her first novel, Sweet Desserts, won the Guardian Fiction Prize. It was followed by Varying Degrees of Hopelessness, Man or Mango? A Lament, Dot in the Universe, Doctors & Nurses and Mimi. She now lives in Edinburgh.