First published in 1983 by a small publishing house on the west coast of America, Fup has now been translated into a dozen languages and has dazzled readers the world over. When you read this book you will understand why.
Set in the coastal hills of northern California between 1880 and the present, the story revolves around three characters: two humans and one duck. Granddaddy Jack Santee, 99 years old and convinced of his immortality, is an unreformed gambler, cranky reprobate and fierce proponent of the still life. He religiously practises his belief that drinking Ol' Death Whisper - a 97-percent-pure whiskey elixir he distils himself from a secret recipe - will keep him alive forever.
Tiny, orphaned at the age of four, is adopted by Granddaddy Jake and grows into a giant young man, as gentle as Jake is belligerent. His passion is building masterfully crafted fences around the ranch although he is constantly thwarted in his progress by his nemesis, a gigantic old boar named Lockjaw that delights in their destruction.
And Fup is the hen mallard duckling that Tiny discovers one day, almost drowned, in one of his post-holes. She in turn is adopted and becomes part of the Santee family. Possessed of an inordinate appetite and wilfulness, Fup grows to twenty pounds and uses her bulk and uncompromising purpose to enforce her sense of order on the Santee household.
The resulting story is hilarious, heart-warming and magical.
The Reviews
'Fup is a pint-sized powerpack of a novel. It's got everything.'Big Issue
'Dodge's prose is powered by a fertile imagination he loves to stretch. His poetry is deliberately simple and concerned with finding answers to the big questions in the most mundane places - where, as the wise know, they are always found.'
Highland News Group
Jim Dodge is the author of three novels - Fup, Not Fade Away and Stone Junction - and a collection so poetry and short prose, Rain on the River.
He lives on an isolated ranch in western Sonoma County and has been by turns an apple picker, a carpet layer, a teacher, a professional gambler, a shepherd for five years and a woodcutter. He currently works as an environmental restorer - primarily tree planting, log-jam removal and erosion control.
