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Kate Beaton
Drawn & Quarterly

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands

$39.95

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About This Book

FROM THE PUBLISHER:

A New York Times Notable book! One of Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2022! Winner of Canada Reads 2023!

"An exceptionally beautiful book about loneliness, labor, and survival. — Carmen Maria Machado

Before there was Kate Beaton, New York Times bestselling cartoonist of Hark! A Vagrant, there was Katie Beaton of the Cape Breton Beatons, specifically Mabou, a tight-knit seaside community where the lobster is as abundant as beaches, fiddles, and Gaelic folk songs. With the singular goal of paying off her student loans, Katie heads out west to take advantage of Alberta’s oil rush—part of the long tradition of East Coasters who seek gainful employment elsewhere when they can’t find it in the homeland they love so much. Katie encounters the harsh reality of life in the oil sands, where trauma is an everyday occurrence yet is never discussed.

Beaton’s natural cartooning prowess is on full display as she draws colossal machinery and mammoth vehicles set against a sublime Albertan backdrop of wildlife, northern lights, and boreal forest. Her first full length graphic narrative, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is an untold story of Canada: a country that prides itself on its egalitarian ethos and natural beauty while simultaneously exploiting both the riches of its land and the humanity of its people.

READ AN EXCERPT:

Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2022

New York Times Notable Book of 2022

New Yorker, Time, NPR, Chicago Tribune, and Washington Post Best Book of 2022

Time Top 10 Nonfiction Books of 2022

#1 on the Publishers Weekly 2022 Critics Poll

Publishers Weekly Top Ten Book of 2022

Globe and Mail Top 100

"A vast and fascinating book, Ducks is a crucial turning point in the career of an important artist." — Etelka Lehoczky, NPR

"Ducks... is a rebuttal to hierarchies of silence, an attempt to draw attention to forms of suffering that are easier to ignore." — Sam Thielman, The New Yorker

"Kate Beaton's new masterpiece just rewrote the standard for graphic memoirs." — Rob Salkowitz, Forbes

“Complex and unforgettable.” — TIME Top 100 Books of the Year

"The stories in this illustrated memoir are as gritty and harrowing as you might expect, but there’s humor here, too, as well as compassion and tenderness." — New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2022

"A fierce, thoughtful and revealing memoir about the Albertan oil industry, which puts money in the pockets of workers... and petrol in car tanks but leaves great scars on both the landscape of northern Canada and the people who staff its giant machines and equipment rigs." — Guardian Best Graphic Novels of 2022

"Ducks is a bruising and intimate account of survival and exploitation—of both the land and the people who worked on it—and is brought to life by Beaton’s immersive illustrations. In unveiling her plight, Beaton makes stunning observations about the intersections of class, gender, and capitalism." — TIME Top 10 Nonfiction Books of 2022

"In a deeply beautiful way, Ducks offers a nuanced perspective on a place and industry that fuels much of Canada but that many of us know very little about. However, it also goes beyond that, presenting a deeply moving picture of humanity in general: lonely, disillusioned and, ultimately, redemptively compassionate." — Globe and Mail Top 100

"Ducks [is] a humane profile of struggling workers, the sorts who produce sneakers, smartphones and fossil fuels but remain faceless." — Chicago Tribune Best Books of 2022

“A monumental synthesis of history, politics, and herself… Ducks weaves Beaton’s own experiences withwarm, humane portraits of the many people she met on the oil sands… 55,000 square miles [that are] a controversial locus of the Canadian economy, culture, and politics, a byword for both prosperity and environmental destruction.” — Kathryn VanArendonk, Vulture

“What a difficult, gorgeous and abidingly humane book.” — Rachel Cooke, The Guardian

“Epic. Kate Beaton headed west [to] one of the world’s most environmentally destructive oil operations, where workers lived in barracks-like camps and men vastly outnumbered women. Her experience there… gave her an insider’s view into a place and piece of Canadian history few outsiders ever see.” — Robert Ito, New York Times

“A serious, moving, and heartfelt piece of cartooning that is as kind as it is fearless. Easily one of the most impressive graphic novels of this year, or works of any kind in the past decade.” — Graeme McMillan, Wired


“A masterpiece, a heartbreak, a nightlight shining in the dark.” — Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“Ducks is both a coming-of-age narrative and a skillful, subtle commentary on class, misogyny, and the human costs of environmental extraction. From the oil fields to the hallways of worker housing, Kate Beaton’s comics are rich with quiet revelations, intimate details, and a deadpan, devastating sense of humor. A generous and illuminating book; I suspect it will stay on my mind for a very long time.” — Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley

“In Ducks, Kate Beaton doesn’t tell us how capitalism extracts, exploits, commodifies, and alienates. Nor does she show us. She recreates life in an oil sands mining operation in granular detail and allows us to make the connections ourselves—as she had to when she showed up to work there at age twenty-one. The effect is devastating. Despite the brutal toll Beaton suffered personally, she has woven from her experience a vast and complex tapestry that captures the humanity of people doing a kind of “dirty work” in which we are all complicit, and it shimmers with grace.” — Alison Bechdel, Fun Home

"[A] soulful masterwork." — Washington Post

"[Ducks is] like the corpus of folk songs and tales from Cape Breton: a collection of small stories and anecdotes about working people, each made more meaningful by its proximity to others." — London Review of Books

  • Author:

    Kate Beaton

  • Title:

    Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands

  • Dimensions:

    9.0 x 6.5 x 2.0 inches

  • Pages:

    436

  • Publisher:

    Drawn & Quarterly

  • Publication Date:

    September 13, 2022

  • ISBN:

    9781770462892

  • Subjects:

    • Comics