February 2020 Indie Next List
“Brief and brilliant, Jenny Offill’s Weather doesn’t need page after page to trap us inside. Tearing through precision-crafted paragraphs, we willingly follow a Brooklyn librarian down a doomsday rabbit hole as she tries to limit the world’s damage to those she loves. On the express bus to the demise of civilization, find a seat next to Lizzie for a wild and witty ride through the storm raging across America. An astute and satisfying read.”
— Ann Woodbeck, Excelsior Bay Books, Excelsior, MN
Description
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER From the beloved author of the nationwide best seller
Dept. of Speculation--one of the
New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of the Year
--a "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.