Mimi

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.

By the author of Ducks, Newburyport, shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2019, the Saltire Fiction Book of the Year Award and the Goldsmiths Prize

It's Christmas Eve in Manhattan. Harrison Hanafan, noted plastic surgeon, falls on his ass. So far, so good. 'Ya can't sit there all day, buddy, looking up people's skirts!' chides a weird gal in a coat like a duvet - Mimi! She kindly conjures for him the miracle of a taxi. Recuperating in his apartment with Schubert, Bette Davis, and a foundling cat, Harrison adds items to his life's work, a List of Melancholy Things (Walmart, puppetry, Velcro, whale eyes, shrimp-eating contests...). But when he receives a dreaded invitation to address his old school, Mimi reappears, with all her curves and chaos. She and Harrison fall emphatically in love. And, as their love-making reaches a whole new kind of climax, the sweet smell of revolution is in the air.

Bolshy, life-affirming, feminist and energetic. It makes you long to chuck your job, gulp oysters and run naked through the surf

A wildly hilarious, modern film noir in fiction form

A true original

Neurotic, crazy and fun, with a love story, too

A call to arms that is light-hearted and playful but also practical . Almost as much a tract of female wish fulfilment as Fifty Shades of Grey

Mimi is ringing with love and rage and hope. Ellmann's best sentences are so springy and rhythmic, they make you think of a Slin