Preview

Prime logo Prime members: New to Audible?
Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Weather

By: Jenny Offill
Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
Try for $0.00

$14.95/month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $13.50

Buy for $13.50

Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.

Publisher's summary

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 10 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)

©2020 Jenny Offill (P)2020 Random House Audio
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2

Critic reviews

"Revelatory ... Offill, who will delight fans of Lydia Davis and Joy Williams, performs breathtaking emotional and social distillation in this pithy and stealthily resonant tale of a woman trying to keep others, and herself, from 'tipping into the abyss.'" (Booklist)

"Always wry and wise. Offill offers an acerbic observer with a wide-ranging mind in this marvelous novel." (Publishers Weekly starred review)

"Clever and seductive...the 'weather' of our days both real and metaphorical, is perfectly captured in Offill's brief, elegant paragraphs, filled with insight and humor. Offill is good company for the end of the world." (Kirkus Reviews starred review)

Editor's Pick

A highly unforgettable-sentence-to-listening-time ratio
"Despite consuming a vast amount of novels, I’m terrible at remembering them, so I consider Jenny Offill’s 2014 book Dept. of Speculation a minor miracle. Years later, I still think of it (and its startling observations on everything from adultery to art monsters to sad, worn-out underwear) on a near-daily basis. While it’s too fresh in my mind to say for sure, Offill’s much-anticipated follow-up is working the same bracing magic on my beleaguered brain. Told by a Brooklyn librarian who picks up a side job with a futurist podcast called "Hell and High Water," Weather is "about" many things: climate change, contemporary dread, the surprising savagery of domestic life, the fascinating characters you meet in libraries. What it isn’t is a traditional narrative with a neat, propulsive plot. Written in fragmented, impressionist vignettes and impeccably voiced by Cassandra Campbell, this is one you’ll want to dedicated some focused listening time to—all the better to have its sentences pleasingly burned into your brain for years to come." —Kat J., Audible Editor