Offseason

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

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

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

Sharp's novel has traces of autofiction and a hint of Rachel Cusk. The prose sparkles, not least in the inventive imagery'

So smart, weird and eerie

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

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?

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

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

One of the sharpest and liveliest debuts of the decade

Sharp's deadpan debut reads like a gen Z update on The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, playfully skewering modern literary tropes . . . a wryly funny portrait of an enervated psyche . . . Offseason skewers, simultaneously and with plenty of droll wit, several commonplace tropes in recent literary fiction: the pat complacency of the trauma plot; the gooey sentimentalism of the immigrant experience novel; the narcissism of autofiction; the heavy foregrounding of theme at the expense of texture . . . Offseason's narrative arc echoes that sense of futility - the novel builds to an elliptical anticlimax - but when the journey is this fun, the destination hardly matters

Intensely observant and ineffably askew. It's a funny, sad, discomfiting, unabashedly weird book that I inhaled and haven't managed to stop thinking about yet

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

A bonkers and beautifully written novel about family, frigidity and the world's most inappropriate crush on Iosif Stalin. Absorbing and original