‘Obscenely good and very funny’ Catherine Lacey
‘You’ve never read anything like it’ Elizabeth McCracken
‘A knockout debut’ Jessica Anthony
A blisteringly funny and transcendently deranged debut novel following 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 Offseason, our fiercely observant but self-deluded narrator finds herself teaching at an all-girls boarding school in a remote coastal town. 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, she 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.
‘You’ve never read anything like it’ Elizabeth McCracken
‘A knockout debut’ Jessica Anthony
A blisteringly funny and transcendently deranged debut novel following 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 Offseason, our fiercely observant but self-deluded narrator finds herself teaching at an all-girls boarding school in a remote coastal town. 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, she 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.
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Reviews
An obscenely good and very funny debut about the black hole of building your identity around the worst things that have ever happened to you. Unhinged in the best way
This voicey debut novel from a Paris Review contributor announces its wit on page one. Our bone dry narrator's bound for a teaching gig at an all-girls boarding school. A creepy seatmate is squeezing her foot, but she's the sort to allow it. An observer of catastrophes, come what may
So smart, weird and eerie
A 'sexually frigid, spiritually sick and morally warped' PhD student tries her hand at teaching English at an all-girls boarding school on the coast. Trauma dumping ensues. As does a wayward lesson plan on Bleak House and the troubled childhood of Stalin. Offseason looks to be the ultimate barometer of twenty-first-century malaise and Gen Z grumbles. But will anyone be able to stop talking about it?
Ottessa Moshfegh meets Yorgos Lanthimos, Offseason simmers with wit and elegance. It's a startling fever dream of a novel. When Avigayl Sharp writes, it is impossible to look away
How does one describe a book as indescribably brilliant as Offseason? It is no less than a contour map of one woman on planet Earth, from the innermost workings of her mind and soul to her unruly body to the hilarious and hostile world around her. It is profound and uproarious, exciting and thought-provoking, unafraid and original, genuinely dark and yet also genuinely joyful. You've never read anything like it
I am a wholesale fan of Avigayl Sharp's fiction. Offseason, full of voice, reads like Sharp's been writing novels for years. Fierce, disciplined observations leap through this unforgettable story of departure and return in an America that has become unrecognizable even to the girls Sharp's narrator attempts to teach. Hilariously deadpan, mordantly sardonic, Offseason is a knockout debut
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
To let us see the world reinvented through the eyes of a narrator who makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar, to have us laugh at what is painful and feel compassion when the narrator is lighting firecracker sentences to get us to look elsewhere-this is the eternal promise of the literary first novel. In Offseason, Avigayl Sharp fulfills that promise, amply, and with art and wit
A bonkers and beautifully written novel about family, frigidity and the world's most inappropriate crush on Iosif Stalin. Absorbing and original