Weather

Description

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2020 'This is so good. We are not ready nor worthy' - Ocean Vuong What are you afraid of, he asks me and the answer of course is dentistry, humiliation, scarcity, then he says what are your most useful skills? People think I'm funny... Lizzie Benson slid into her job as a librarian without a traditional degree. But this gives her a vantage point from which to practise her other calling: as an unofficial shrink. For years, she has supported her God-haunted mother and her recovering addict brother. They have both stabilised for the moment, but then her old mentor, Sylvia Liller, makes a proposal. Sylvia has become famous for her prescient podcast, Hell and High Water, and wants to hire Lizzie to answer the mail she receives: from left-wingers worried about climate change and right wingers worried about the decline of western civilisation. As she dives into this polarised world, she begins to wonder what it means to keep tending your own garden once you've seen the flames beyond its walls. When her brother becomes a father and Sylvia a recluse, Lizzie is forced to acknowledge the limits of what she can do. But if she can't save others, then what, or who, might save her? And all the while the voices of the city keep floating in--funny, disturbing, and increasingly mad.

Jenny Offill's novel Dept. of Speculation was shortlisted for the Folio Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award, and was chosen as a book of the year over 20 times, including by the Guardian, Daily Telegraph, FT, Daily Mail, Stylist, Observer and Vogue. She is also the author of the novel Last Things, and four books for children. She lives upstate New York with her family.

This is so good. We are not ready nor worthy -- Ocean Vuong 'As soon as I finished [Dept. of Speculation], I turned it over and started again. Stunning' -- Maggie O'Farrell The end times don't deserve such exquisite literary investigation. I folded down every page until I realised there was no point, I would fold them all, I would read the book again the second I was finished. A gorgeous, funny, deadly serious and warmly revelatory mesh of perfect paragraphs -- Max Porter Jenny Offill writes beautiful sentences; she is also a deft curator of silences. It's this counterpoint of eloquence and felt absence that enables her to register the emotional and political weather of our present -- Ben Lerner No one writes about the intersection of love and existential despair like Jenny Offill -- Jia Tolentino Jenny Offill conjures entire worlds with her steady, near-pointillist technique. One feels a whole heaving, breathing universe behind her every line. Dread, the sensation of sinking, lostness, and being cast away from any sense of safety infiltrates every interaction and private moment in this book, like the ashes from the burning world she describes -- Sheila Heti Weather is a beautiful book, both subtle and powerful. In writing, that's a superhuman feat. And now is exactly when we need the superhumans. Make haste. Read it -- Lydia Millet Novelists don't need to dream the end of the world anymore - they need to wake up to it. Jenny Offill is one of today's few essential voices, because she writes about essential things, in sentences so clipped and glittering it's as if they are all cut from one diamond -- Jonathan Dee, author of * The Privileges * With exceptional originality, intensity and sweetness [...] Dept. of Speculation is a shattered novel that stabs and sparkles at the same time. . . give in and read it * Guardian * There is no doubt that Jenny Offill is the writer for this particular historical moment. WEATHER is a tour de force of her considerable and startling gifts: the compressed and gorgeous sentences, the astounding comic timing, the profound and wise surprises. The miracle of this novel is how it looks at our contradictions and conditions with such bracing honesty and yet gives us a tender hopefulness toward these fraught humans. Offill makes us feel implicated but also loved -- Dana Spiotta A fragmented wander through an anxious, funny mind, with odd connections arriving in overheard anecdotes. It's great * Observer * [Offill is] such a fine, funny writer, her observations shot through with luminous intelligence and emotional insight. Her last novel, Dept. of Speculation is also superb -- Alex Preston * Observer * Moving, heartbreaking and frequently funny -- Five great novels of the decade * New European * Elegant, entertaining... zesty... told in short, shimmery snippets...delightfully silly; jam-packed with wise and wistful sentences that you will want to underline and quote to all your friends * Psychologies * Wryly funny * Daily Mail *