As the New York Times comments, ‘though this novel is set nearly 20 years ago, it feels current. Superficially her life is perfect but there is a void at the centre of her world.įuelled by an unscrupulous psychiatrist - a wonderfully grotesque figure - she begins a regimented programme of hibernation induced and sustained by a cocktail of narcotics and aided by an avant-garde artist chronicling her descent into self-created somnolence.Ībly considering the relationship between the deceptively shimmering surface and what lies beneath, Ottessa Moshfegh’s second novel perfectly depicts a generation poised on the brink of 9/11 whilst holding up a mirror to the crises of our own fragmented, overloaded and superficially motivated times. Infermiterol: For when you don’t want to get up until it’s over.īeautiful, young, successful and wealthy, the novel’s narrator lives in an endless bubble of social engagements, caught up in the heady thrill of early 2000’s New York. Told with the same unique combination of candour, biting black humour and insightful human understanding that caught readers’ attention in her Man Booker Prize-shortlisted novel Eileen, My Year of Rest and Relaxation is shock-factor fiction at its finest. By year's end, the veil between blindness and sight, life and death, the natural world and the spirit world will prove to be very thin indeed.Shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize 2019 But when fate brings Marek into violent proximity to the lord's family, new and occult forces upset the old order.

The people's desperate need to believe that there are powers that be who have their best interests at heart is put to a cruel test by Villiam and the priest, especially in this year of record drought and famine. Among their number is Father Barnabas, the town priest and lackey for the depraved lord and governor, Villiam, whose hilltop manor contains a secret embarrassment of riches. For some people, Ina's home in the woods outside the village is a place to fear and to avoid, a godless place. Her gift often brings her the transmission of sacred knowledge on levels far beyond those available to other villagers, however religious they might be. Ina's gifts extend beyond childcare: she possesses a unique ability to communicate with the natural world.

One of life's few consolations for Marek is his enduring bond with the blind village midwife, Ina, who suckled him when he was a baby, as she did for many of the village's children. Little Marek, the abused and delusional son of the village shepherd, never knew his mother his father told him she died in childbirth. In a village in a medieval fiefdom buffeted by natural disasters, a motherless shepherd boy finds himself the unlikely pivot of a power struggle that puts all manner of faith to a savage test, in a spellbinding novel that represents Ottessa Moshfegh's most exciting leap yet.

Ottessa moshfegh new novel