Last Things was well reviewed, but it was Offill’s 2014 follow-up, Dept of Speculation, which really put her on the map. “Parts of the world, yes, but not the world entire,” Sylvia replies. “But hasn’t the world always been going to hell in a handbasket?” asks Lizzie, a university librarian, in a conversation with Sylvia, her old graduate tutor, who now hosts a popular podcast called Hell and High Water.

Lizzie Benson, the already anxious and overburdened Brooklyn-based narrator of Weather, finds her fears snowballing in the face of two contemporary emergencies: the 2016 election of Donald Trump, and the escalating climate crisis. It’s been 21 years since Last Things was published, but in a gradation similar to that of the cosmic calendar, in the space of only three books, Offill has taken her readers from the soupy, swampy beginnings of the world through to what is progressively looking like the end of days. As Anna becomes increasingly psychotic, the mother and daughter’s frenzied adventures are charted against the stages of evolution as outlined in Anna’s take on a curriculum. She paints it black, covers it in glow-in-the-dark stars and writes, in white paint, a scaled-down timeline of the history of the world from “Big Bang”, “First humans” (“one billion years of real time = 24 days on the cosmic calendar”) and so on. When, in Last Things (1999), Jenny Offill’s first novel, the eight-year-old narrator’s eccentric mother, Anna, decides to homeschool her daughter, their lessons initially take place in Anna’s sewing room, which she has transformed into a “cosmic calendar”. Jenny Offill’s bravura third novel is an uncanny portrait of how it feels to be alive right now

Weather offill review