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In Avigayl Sharp's brilliant and bold debut novel, Offseason, our fiercely observant but self-deluded narrator finds herself teaching at an all-girls boarding school on the Eastern Seaboard.
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 consorts and canoodles with the town's locals—including the possibly disgraced male teacher whose job she's taken over—implicating everyone she meets in her obsessive quest to pin down where, exactly, her own life went wrong.
Though she's vowed never to return to her hometown in the middle of the country, the holiday season sends her careening back into the orbit of her overbearing, maladjusted family. Drunk at a bar on the frigid afternoon of the seventh night of Chanukah, she encounters the figure from her adolescence who may or may not be responsible for violating her, bringing her down, and ruining her life. The past collides with the present—but catharsis and closure are nowhere to be found. Not at the bar. Not in her childhood home. And certainly not in the unruly spirals of her mind.
Serious yet irreverent with a delirious velocity, Offseason reimagines the conversation around trauma while reckoning with the doomed project of "speaking your truth," the compulsion to repeat, and whether we can be transformed by art and love.
"Sharp grabs the contemporary fixation on trauma by the horns and rides it to a triumphant and illuminating first-place finish." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Sharp's distinctive debut ... casts a spell on the reader, thanks to [her] powers of observation and the narrator's eccentric disposition." —Publishers Weekly
"Sharp's narrator is exactly the right amount of unhinged: She'll overshare about the worst parts of her life with anyone who will listen, and even people who don't want to, but she always stops just short of fully imploding her life or turning evil ... It's a whip-smart, sardonic book." —Sarah Rose Etter, author of Ripe and The Book of X
"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." —Catherine Lacey, author of The Möbius Book
This information about Offseason was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Avigayl Sharp is a writer from Chicago. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, New England Review, and elsewhere. She was a 2023-2024 writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers. Offseason is her first novel.
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