Offseason

A blisteringly funny and transcendently deranged debut novel for fans of Ottessa Moshfegh, Patricia Lockwood and George Saunders

'Obscenely good and very funny' CATHERINE LACEY
'A startling fever dream of a novel' LUCY ROSE
'So smart, weird and eerie . . . 'I recommend everyone buy it when it comes out' MADELINE CASH

A young woman who takes a job at an all-girls boarding school in a small coastal town to teach English literature - and to try, desperately, to escape the trap that is herself.

In between manic lectures that veer from Charles Dickens's Bleak House to the childhood maltreatment of her beloved Iosif Stalin and the generational legacy of the Holocaust, our fiercely observant but self-deluded narrator implicates everyone she meets in her quest to pin down where exactly her own life went wrong.

Obsessed with her own trauma and the trauma - real or imagined - of everyone around her, and her quest to escape from her past is undermined by her inability to ever stop talking about it.

Serious and wise yet written with a delirious velocity, Offseason marks the arrival of a fiercely original literary talent.

'Indescribably brilliant . . . You've never read anything like it' ELIZABETH McCRACKEN

'A bonkers and beautifully written novel . . . Absorbing and original' NUSSAIBAH YOUNIS

'Yes, Offseason is hilarious, eccentric and gleefully mean-spirited, but just when you think you know what Sharp is doing, she will shatter your heart. I haven't read something so incisive, so slyly tender in years' LISA McINERNEY

'A narrator who makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar' MICHAEL CHABON