I love how Jenny Offill takes the every day and makes it otherwordly. She's one of those writers who can shed new light on the most mundane things and render them beautiful. Weather is imbued with her customary poetic touch - although it's a short book, there is plenty here to make you stop and think.

There is no plot to speak of, and there were times when I found the leaps in character and subject matter a bit too jarring. It was only when a continuous storyline started to take shape about halfway through that I began to have a sense of time and structure. There were a few times I caught myself re-reading sentences, trying to feel my way through the narrative.

Weather is at its best when it muses over its great themes: climate change, survival and hope. This is profound and fresh socio-political commentary at its most deconstructed, perceptions of every day life held up to the light.

I never know what to say about her books. She's great at small moments that speak to the core of what it means to be alive.

I find her thought provoking and accomplished but I come away kinda wishing for more of a traditional narrative from her as much as I enjoy her small fragments.

Sorry, bad review alert. I think this is the quickest I've ever read a book (less than 24 hours), and that's because I skim read it. I was hoping something was going to happen in the 280 odd pages, but it didn't. It's more a book of a person's meandering thoughts, and as such it was very disjointed. I couldn't get a feel for any of the characters, and I thought the author was trying a bit too hard to be funny and clever. Apologies. I read somewhere that it was their book of the month, so obviously to someone's taste, but just not mine.

I love the style of this book, I would definitely recommend this book and love the fragmented writing style. It's an easy read however very deep but the lightness in it lifts it back up again. Looking forward to being able to recommend this to my friends when it comes out!

A brief quotation at the beginning of this thoughtful, poetic novel reminds us, I think, of an earlier time when the American people were more certain of, and more comfortable with, their relationship with the earth upon which they lived out their everyday lives. It reads:

NOTES FROM A TOWN MEETING IN MILFORD, CONNECTICUT, 1640
Voted, that the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof; voted, that the earth is given to the Saints; voted that we are the Saints.

But here in the twenty-first century things are very different for Lizzie, a librarian, mother and all-round caring person. We all know a Lizzie. Her life is perhaps typical of the lives of many women of her age around the world. Constantly struggling to meet the conflicting demands on her time, her attention and her compassion she has little time for her own needs. Torn between her husband, her precocious son and his schooling, her troubled, unstable brother, her ageing mother, and, not least, her work and colleagues, Lizzie appears to live in a constant state of anxiety, fearful of failing them all:

I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I can’t seem to stop making bad decisions. The weird thing is they don’t sneak up on me. I can see them coming all the way down the pike.

And there’s this lovely, wry admission of her maternal anxiety:

A few days later, I yelled at him for losing his new lunch box, and he turned to me and said, Are you sure you’re my mother? Sometimes you don’t seem like a good enough person.
He was just a kid, so I let it go. And now, years later, I probably only think of it, I don’t know, once or twice a day.

There is also a sense of under-achievement about Lizzie, a sense of unfulfilled potential. She dropped out of grad school many years before and it was her tutor, Sylvia, that helped her get her position at the library even though she is not properly qualified for the job. Sylvia is an environmentalist with a doom-filled podcast and speaking engagements. Lizzie doubles as her assistant, travelling with her and answering the e-mails she receives from doom-filled right-wing evangelicals and left-wing environmentalists alike.

The central character’s busy, disjointed life is reflected in the episodic, fragmentary nature of this novel. The reader jumps from brief snippets of conversations, to brief scenes of domestic life and social interaction. From survivalist tips to whimsical asides. And there are even jokes:

We don’t serve time travelers here.
A time traveler walks into the bar.

The author combines our fear of climate change and global environmental disaster with the apocalyptic attitudes of the American religious right and then mixes it with our new-found unease with the post-truth, fake news Trumpian politics that has unfolded before us in recent years. There is a sense that this is a novel of living in the End Times. But the dry humour and lightness of touch in the writing lifts this novel from being merely one that charts our current sense of disquiet and foreboding to one that captures what it is to be alive in these constantly changing, rather unnerving times.

Jenny Offill shows us that there is indeed much fear and anxiety in our modern lives but also that there is laughter and even consolation to be found in them as well. She shows us that there is beauty in everyday life; that there is poetry in the mundane.

Intimate and immediate, Weather is a short novel about how our environmentally, politically and socially fractured world affects Lizzie and those around her. Written in fragments, sometimes everyday observations or conversations, sometimes deeper thoughts that keep Lizzie awake at night, worrying about the future, for her son, for her addict brother now with a daughter of his own, for her mother who has no savings.

It is funny and sad and very human. It is also thought provoking and intelligent, a timely book. Highly recommended.

My thanks to Granta Publications and Netgalley for the opportunity to read Weather.

Weather is a very readable and perceptive new novel from Jenny Offill. Lizzie is torn between caring for her addict brother and her own family. Her own personal outlook changes, mostly for the worse, through the story. She works for Sylvia, a prominent environmental campaigner. After Trump is elected, there is a culture shift, and fewer people believe in protecting the environment. There is a creeping sense that the end is nigh.

Jenny Offil’s latest novel “Weather” is a bit like the weather itself: you’ll find sunshine and rain, it is often a bit cloudy and at times unbearably hot. She describes the life of a mother, hobby psychologist and librarian who is also worried by climate change and its implications it might have on her and her family’s life.

There is no real plot line that you can follow. Both Lizzie and her addicted brother Henry serious struggle in life and have difficulties finding their place and creating a kind of safe private environment for themselves. Nevertheless, it is often witty and I most certainly highly appreciate the author’s capacity of poetic narration.

Funny and sad and beautiful. Jenny Offill's Weather stares into the heart of the end of everything. The novel is so human and so timely. You don't know quite what's being done to you as you read it but by the end you know, by the end you feel the weight of the world in every line and perfect paragraph.

'Weather' exerts a subtle grip while you are reading it - somehow it is both fragmentary and sprawling, its sum much greater than its parts - but it has really stayed with me since I finished it. Unshowy in the way it uses the seemingly ordinary to describe the unstable state of the USA and the world at the moment - mental health crises, addiction, climate change (weather) - it works as a state of the nation novel (and so much more) without you really noticing. Full of fine observations - "Insomnia as a badge of honour. Proof that you are paying attention'; 'It is important to be on the alert for "the decisive moment"' - that moment never quite comes (whether) but the book is also full of such moments, seemingly unrecognised. Very grateful for having had the opportunity to read this. As others have pointed out, unlike most books, it could have been longer but is probably exactly the right length.

4.5 rounded up

Told in a series of short snippets, Weather follows Lizzie Benson, a librarian and ordinary woman who is navigating the post-Trump, post-truth landscape of life in contemporary America. Lizzie cares for her troubled recovering addict brother, her old beyond his years son and spent time looking after her dying mother. Through her conversations with them, and others - her former mentor Sylvia and patrons of the library in which she works - Offill weaves a tale which perfectly encapsulates the zeitgeist of late 2010s life. But this is all delicately balanced and Offill provides enough levity to prevent it all from getting too heavy and anxiety-inducing.

While they're totally different books the skill demonstrated here in perfectly evoking this weird time we're living through reminded me at times of what Ali Smith has done in her Seasons quartet. It's that wonderful kind of writing which demonstrates a lot of skill, often through restraint, but never feels forced.

Loved Dept.of Speculation told everyone to read this fantastic novel.Will be doing the same with Weather by this brilliant author..Her characters come alive are so real I feel like they are my friends or neighbors.Her way of writing dialogue sharing characters thoughts and worries pulls me right in to the story their lives.Loved this book highly recommend to all lovers of literary fiction,#netgalley#granta..

The best thing I’ve read this year, and it’s not even out until 2020.

Jenny Offill is up there amongst my favourite writers, with a form like no other.

This has definite echoes of her previous novel, Dept. of Speculation, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Ofill has this way of making really succinct and shrewd observations of some of the idiosyncrasies - and neuroses - we experience in life, both logically and emotionally.

The only criticism I ever have of Offill is that her books are so short. I miss them when I’ve got to the end.

Weather wades into the life of Liz, a librarian struggling to keep afloat amidst crises global, national and personal. She begins answering letters for her environmentalist ex-professor, and is overwhelmed by the prospect of ecological apocalypse and her inability to adequately prepare for the inevitable; she constantly worries about her recovering addict brother, whose dependence on her only grows after having a baby; she is anxious about being a good mother to her son, and her desire to protect him from the world; she briefly falls a bit in love with a handsome war journalist. Like Dept of Speculation (which I loved and read twice), this book is a disjointed mass of fears, hopes and stories that culminates in something that is greater than its parts. It is particularly sharp in its observations about America in the wake of Trump's election ('Your people have finally fallen into history, he said. The rest of us are already here.'), but is most beautiful when talking about love ('Sometimes your heart runs away with someone and all it takes is a bandanna on a stick.')

I loved the narrator but found some of the other characters hard to keep up with. Specially as who they were and their role/job etc wasn’t always explicitly named. Maybe if it was read in one sitting then I wouldn’t have had this problem so much.

I found it both witty and thought provoking and would recommend you give it a read.
Offill turns everyday life into poetry

Weather by Jenny Offill is about a highly perceptive woman who is a librarian and a mother and sometimes the carer of her brother. I was enjoying it so much I would've liked it to be longer.