Offseason
'Phenomenal' MADELINE CASH, author of LOST LAMBS
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected 7 May 2026
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A blisteringly funny and transcendently deranged debut novel for fans of Ottessa Moshfegh, Patricia Lockwood and George Saunders
'Obscenely good and very funny' CATHERINE LACEY
'A startling fever dream of a novel' LUCY ROSE
'So smart, weird and eerie . . . 'I recommend everyone buy it when it comes out' MADELINE CASH
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 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, our fiercely observant but self-deluded narrator 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, the 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.
'Indescribably brilliant . . . You've never read anything like it' ELIZABETH McCRACKEN
'A bonkers and beautifully written novel . . . Absorbing and original' NUSSAIBAH YOUNIS
'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' LISA McINERNEY
'A narrator who makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar' MICHAEL CHABON
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A cynical PhD dropout tries to make do in her new digs at a girl's boarding school, in Sharp's distinctive debut. It's winter and the unnamed narrator has traveled to a seaside tourist town somewhere in the Northeast, where she's been hired to teach English literature. On double doses of her prescription stimulants, she lectures on subjects she's obsessed with, such as the life of Stalin and Dickens's Bleak House, noting how the students "stared back at me with the vacant curiosity of idiot fish whose aquarium had just been tapped by a finger." As the narrator settles in at the school, where "every year the cottages sank another inch into the earth," she befriends quirky students like Cordelia and begins dating fellow teacher Thomas, who's recently returned from leave, which he claims was due to a family illness. The lightly plotted narrative casts a spell on the reader, thanks to Sharp's powers of observation and the narrator's eccentric disposition, as when her seatmate on a train pretends he's sleeping and plays footsie with her, and she welcomes the touch. This pensive and offbeat work is an acquired taste.
