Weather, by Jenny Offill (Granta 2020)

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Neil

Weather is an unsettling collection of domestic vignettes, almost prose poems, which gradually reveal the fear about the state of the world that we all feel. Lizzie Benson is a librarian, an observer of people, an unofficial shrink and care giver for her mother and addict brother. In the first person, she relates conversations, snippets of news and observations on current events. It's an oblique, sideways glance at contemporary America in the age of Trump, climate change, inequality etc; none of these are examined in detail, merely observed, which somehow adds to their dark menace. A brilliant novel, I was disappointed it didn't make the Booker longest announced recently.