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
