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 Benson slid into her job as a librarian without a traditional degree. But this gives her a vantage point from which to practice her other calling: she is a fake shrink. For years she has tended to her God-haunted mother and her recovering addict brother. They have both stabilized for the moment, but Lizzie has little chance to spend her new free time with husband and son before 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 Lizzie 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 address the limits of her own experience—but still she tries to save everyone, using everything she's learned about empathy and despair, conscience and collusion, from her years of wandering the library stacks . . . And all the while the voices of the city keep floating in—funny, disturbing, and increasingly mad.
“Offill’s fragmentary structure evokes an unbearable emotional intensity: something at the core of the story that cannot be narrated directly, by straight chronology, because to do so would be like looking at the sun…” —The New York Times
Industry Reviews
"Genius. . . . Remarkable and resonant. . . . The right novel for the end of the world."
--Los Angeles Times
"Tiny in size but immense in scope, radically disorienting yet reassuringly humane, strikingly eccentric and completely irresistible. . . . Luminous."
--The Boston Globe
"Brilliant. . . . Offill's writing is often brisk and comic, and her book's format underlines her gifts. . . . Weather is her most soulful book. . . . Offill's humor is saving humor; it's as if she's splashing vinegar to deglaze a pan."
--The New York Times Book Review
"Darkly funny and urgent. . . . Offill is a master of the glancing blow."
--NPR
Jenny Offill is the master of novels told in sly, burnished fragments. . . . In Offill's hands, the form becomes something new . . . a method of distilling experience into its brightest, most blazing forms -- atoms of intense feeling. . . . These fragments feel like: teeming worlds suspended in white space, entire novels condensed into paragraphs. . . . What she is doing is coming as close as anyone ever has to writing the very nature of being itself.
--Parul Sehgal, The New York Times
"Weather holds its own with the strongest examples of the new non-speculative climate fiction. It has the feel of a classic, the kind of book that future humans will read in order to figure out what people were thinking in the early decades of the twenty-first century."
--Los Angeles Review of Books
"Glorious, dizzying, disconcerting and often laugh-out-loud hysterical."
--USA Today
"Time flies by in this wry story of a family--librarian Lizzie, her classics buff husband, their son, and her brother, a recovering addict. Apocalypse (climate and otherwise) looms over the narrative, and yet it is funny and hopeful too."
--Vanity Fair
"[Weather] solidifies the author's place among the vanguard of writers who are reinvigorating literature."
--O, The Oprah Magazine
"Compact and wholly contemporary, Jenny Offill's third novel sees a librarian find deep meaning and deep despair in her side gig as an armchair therapist for those in existential crisis. . . . A canny, comic story about the power of human need."
--Esquire
"An eerily realistic reflection on what it feels like to exist in a bubble of nonstop information."
--Time
"A beach read for those who like to worry about the beaches. . . . This is a pre-apocalyptic novel, and its subject is dread, not disaster."
--The Nation
"Like a sort of literary shadow box, the novel collects images and instances from the past few years, with the 2016 election as a clarifying point in this picture of a fraught and fragmenting world. . . . One of the wonders of Offill's writing is that her light touch lets us glimpse the very real dread lurking underneath."
--Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Offill has achieved the near impossible. She has made grappling with the climate crisis not only important and challenging -- but also, a tough assignment, entertaining."
--The Toronto Star
"Another perfectly wonderful trip inside the mind of Jenny Offill. . . . [Her] fiction is such a pleasure to read. . . . The funniness of many of her sentences indicates how precisely she calibrates them."
--Slate
