Offseason

In Avigayl Sharp’s bold debut novel, Offseason, a fiercely observant yet deeply unreliable narrator takes a teaching job at an all-girls boarding school on the Eastern Seaboard. Between manic lectures on everything from Bleak House to Stalin and the generational legacy of the Holocaust, she becomes entangled with the town’s locals, including the possibly disgraced teacher whose position she has inherited. As she fixates on the question of where her life went wrong, everyone around her becomes part of the investigation.

Though she has sworn never to return to her Midwestern hometown, the holidays pull her back into the orbit of her overbearing, dysfunctional family. Then, drunk at a bar on the seventh night of Chanukah, she encounters a figure from her adolescence who may or may not have violated her, derailed her life, and brought her to where she is now.

As past and present begin to bleed together, the narrator searches for catharsis and closure but finds neither in the bar, her childhood home, nor the relentless spirals of her own mind.

Serious yet irreverent and propelled by a delirious energy, Offseason explores trauma, the compulsion to repeat, the fraught idea of “speaking your truth,” and whether art and love can truly change us.