Skip to content

Weather

Book
Weather by Jenny Offill

As seen:

  • Women's Prize for Fiction 2020

By Jenny Offill

avg rating

0 reviews

Find your local library.

Buy this book from hive.co.uk to support The Reading Agency and local bookshops at no additional cost to you.

’What are you afraid of, he asks me and the answer of course is dentistry, humiliation, scarcity, then he says what are your most useful skills?

People think I’m funny’ Lizzie Benson slid into her job as a librarian without a traditional degree.

But this gives her a vantage point from which to practise her other calling: as an unofficial shrink.

For years, she has supported her God-haunted mother and her recovering addict brother.

They have both stabilized for the moment, but then 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 she 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 acknowledge the limits of what she can do.

But if she can’t save others, then what, or who, might save her? And all the while the voices of the city keep floating in—funny, disturbing, and increasingly mad.

Latest offers

View our other programmes