Offseason - Avigayl Sharp

'Obscenely good and very funny' - Catherine Lacey, author of The Mobius Book

'Hilariously deadpan, mordantly sardonic, Offseason is a knockout debut' - Jessica Anthony, author of The Most

'Profound and uproarious, exciting and thought-provoking, unafraid and original ... You've never read anything like it' - Elizabeth McCracken, author of The Hero of this Book

Offseason is narrated by a self-described 'sexually frigid, spiritually sick, and morally warped' PhD dropout who arrives at an all-girls boarding school in a remote coastal tourist town to teach English.

While manically lecturing her students about Charles Dickens's Bleak House, she veers from her syllabus to highlight the childhood maltreatment of her beloved Iosif Stalin, the impact of the Holocaust and the Soviet Union on her family, and the crucial distinctions between ephebophilia and pedophilia.

Obsessed with her own trauma and the trauma - real or imagined - of everyone around her, her quest to escape the past is undermined by her inability to ever stop talking about it.

Savage, hilarious and profound, it marks the arrival of a truly original literary talent.

'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 fulfils that promise, amply, and with art and wit' - Michael Chabon, author of Moonglow