INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER From the beloved author of the nationwide best seller Dept.
of Speculation-one of the New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of the Year-a darkly
funny and urgent (NPR) tour de force about a family and a nation in crisis Lizzie Benson slid
into her job as a librarian without a traditional degree. But this gives her a vantage point
from which to practice her other calling: she is a fake shrink. For years she has tended to her
God-haunted mother and her recovering addict brother. They have both stabilized for the moment
but Lizzie has little chance to spend her new free time with husband and son before 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 Lizzie 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 address the limits of her
own experience-but still she tries to save everyone using everything she's learned about
empathy and despair conscience and collusion from her years of wandering the library stacks .
. . And all the while the voices of the city keep floating in-funny disturbing and
increasingly mad. Offill's fragmentary structure evokes an unbearable emotional intensity:
something at the core of the story that cannot be narrated directly by straight chronology
because to do so would be like looking at the sun… -The New York Times
