Author(s): Ottessa Moshfegh

Fiction

A New York Times Notable Book and Times Critics' Top Books of 2018. From one of our boldest, most celebrated new literary voices, a novel about a young woman's efforts to duck the ills of the world by embarking on an extended hibernation with the help of one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature and the battery of medicines she prescribes.Our narrator should be happy, shouldn't she? She's young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn't just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It's the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong? My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers. Named a Best Book of the Year by: The Washington Post, Time, NPR, Amazon, Vice, Bustle, The New York Times, The Guardian, Kirkus Reviews, Entertainment Weekly, The AV Club, & Audible

Review by Fantine;

'Bizarre and wonderful, Moshfesgh explores the lethargy of depression and the sheer exhaustion that comes from well, being alive. Our protagonist is a beautiful New Yorker working in an art gallery in the year 2000, she has everything and yet she couldn’t care less - about the world, her friends, and least of all herself.  So she devises a plan to sleep for an entire year. But is her life, her grief, something she can sleep off or is a state of ‘alright’ unattainable for some. Comforting in it’s existentialism (especially during 2020) and polarizing in it’s nihilism, I was surprisingly moved by this objectively unlikable protagonist. I loved this novel.'

- Fantine, Bookseller at Collins Booksellers Moonee Ponds