book cover of Weather
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Weather

(2020)
A novel by

 
 
Awards
Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction Best Book (nominee)
Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Writing Best Book (nominee)
Women's Prize For Fiction Best Novel (nominee)
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER 

From the beloved author of the nationwide best seller Dept. of Speculationone of the New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of the Yeara “darkly funny and urgent” (NPR) tour de force about a family, and a nation, in crisis


Lizzie works in the library of a university where she was once a promising graduate student. Her side hustle is answering the letters that come in to Hell and High Water, the doom-laden podcast hosted by her former mentor. At first it suits her, this chance to practice her other calling as an unofficial shrink—she has always played this role to her divorced mother and brother recovering from addiction—but soon Lizzie finds herself struggling to strike the obligatory note of hope in her responses. The reassuring rhythms of her life as a wife and mother begin to falter as her obsession with disaster psychology and people preparing for the end of the world grows. A marvelous feat of compression, a mix of great feeling and wry humor, Weather is an electrifying encounter with one of the most gifted writers at work today.


Genre: Literary Fiction

Praise for this book

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"This is so good. We are not ready nor worthy." - Ocean Vuong


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