From Jenny Offill’s sublime Weather to a powerful new novel from Jacqueline Woodson and Emma Jane Unsworth’s Adults, this week’s best new fiction
Weather
Jenny Offill Granta £12.99
If you’ve not yet discovered Offill’s sublime blend of hilarity, warmth and existential despair, there’s no better place to start than her new novel.
Its heroine, Lizzie Benson, has squandered her academic potential and settled into life as a university librarian/unofficial shrink. She’s also the mother of a small boy named Eli and the wife of computer-coder Ben.
But when her old professor offers her a gig fielding letters from listeners to her futurism podcast, Lizzie becomes obsessed with preparing for the climate apocalypse. Her laconic, bittersweet internal monologue is a marvel, and far more entertaining that it has any right to be, given the subject matter.
Hephzibah Anderson
Adults
Emma Jane Unsworth The Borough Press £12.99
Unsworth made a splash with her novel Animals, a refreshingly honest look at the intensity and toxicity of twentysomething female friendship, which she also adapted into a memorable film.
Her new book, Adults, shifts its focus to the mid-30s, and Jenny, a London homeowner with an enviable job as a columnist for an online feminist magazine and a fully Instagrammable life. Yet she is struggling in an age of social media-fuelled anxiety, loneliness and self-doubt.
Unsworth has delivered another satirical – and at times terrifyingly recognisable – take on contemporary life, as empathetic as it is energising.
Catherine Taylor
Red At The Bone
Jacqueline Woodson W&N £14.99
A teenage pregnancy is the catalyst for this powerful, poetic, punchy novel, set in Brooklyn’s African-American community.
Iris and Aubrey get together in high school, have baby Melody and move in with Iris’s parents. Aubrey is contented with fatherhood but Iris is restless, already imagining a future life for herself that doesn’t have Aubrey in it – or Melody.
In prose that sings off the page, Woodson tells their stories and the stories of Iris’s parents – tender Sammy Po’Boy and fierce Sabe – weaving a spare family saga that marries joy with sadness. Gorgeous.
Eithne Farry