From the Man Booker-shortlisted Author of Eileen
The New York Times Bestseller
It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?
Our narrator has many of the advantages of life: Young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, she lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like everything else, by her inheritance. But there is a vacuum at the heart of things, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents in college, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her alleged best friend.
Blackly funny, both merciless and compassionate – dangling its legs over the ledge of 9/11 – My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a showcase for the gifts of one of America’s major young writers.
About the Author
Ottessa Moshfegh is a fiction writer from Boston. She was awarded the Plimpton Prize for her stories in the Paris Review and was granted a creative-writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her first book, the novella McGlue, was recently published by Vintage. Her novel Eileen was awarded the 2016 PEN/Hemingway Award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Her collection of stories, Homesick for Another World, was published in 2017.
Industry Reviews
The book that everybody's talking about... I read it and was entranced.
The Times
This is the first book I couldn't put down this year... Almost offensive with its close-to-the-bone truths, it's shockingly relatable. And legitimately laugh-out-loud funny. Ottessa Moshfegh is sharp, savage and hilarious.
Isabel Dexter Elle
The superabundantly talented...Moshfegh's sentences are piercing and vixenish... she is always a deep pleasure to read.
New York Times
My Year of Rest and Relaxation is whip-smart, continuously compelling, and acerbic in all the right ways.
Daily Telegraph
Electrifying... [Moshfegh] is adept at crafting compelling female characters who violate the rules of femininity... Moshfegh's protagonist is an unlikely revolutionary.
Vanity Fair