
Published: 13/02/2020
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Told in short snippets of crystalline prose, Weather is a wry, quietly powerful novel whose understated insight and keen intelligence illuminates aspects of everyday life in Trump’s America.
Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2020
Shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction 2020
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 stabilized 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 civilization.
As she dives into this polarized 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.
Publisher: Granta Books
ISBN: 9781783784769
Number of pages: 224
Weight: 280 g
Dimensions: 198 x 129 x 13 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
'A superb fragmentary novel about what it is like to live now' - The Sunday Times
'A brilliant exemplar for the autofictional method' - The Guardian
'Using her characteristic, epigrammatic prose style that's both jittery and deadpan at the same time, Offill presents us with a wryly funny state-of-the-nation novel wired to the hilt with a dread that'll infect your dreams.' - The Daily Mail
'A barometer of how it feels to live now a powerful simulation of the current cultural atmosphere' - The Sunday Times
'It’s surprising, given the subject matter, how much fun Weather is, both to read and discuss, and also how darkly funny' - The Guardian
'In Weather, we construct a whole from the pieces that we hold in our hands a truly remarkable novel, perhaps the most powerful portrait of Trump's America yet.' - The Observer
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