Description

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, Time, NPR, Vice, Bustle, The New York Times, The Guardian, Kirkus Reviews, Entertainment Weekly, The AV Club, and Audible.

A New York Times Bestseller and selected among New York Times Readers Pick: 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.

“One of the most compelling protagonists modern fiction has offered in years: a loopy, quietly furious pillhead whose Ambien ramblings and Xanax-fueled tirades somehow wend their way through sad, funny, and utterly odd moments toward something profoundly genuine.” — Entertainment Weekly

“Darkly hilarious…[Moshfegh] is the kind of provocative writer who makes you laugh out loud even as she draws blood.” — Vogue

From Ottessa Moshfegh, one of literature’s most daring contemporary voices, comes a memorable novel about a young woman determined to escape the world’s disappointments by sleeping away an entire year with assistance from an absurdly terrible psychiatrist and the excessive medications prescribed to her.

On the surface, our narrator seems to have everything needed for happiness. She’s young, thin, attractive, a recent graduate from Columbia University with an easy job at a trendy art gallery, and lives comfortably in an Upper East Side Manhattan apartment, her lifestyle sustained entirely by a generous inheritance. Yet a deep, relentless emptiness consumes her, one that isn’t simply explained by the death of her parents, the careless attitude of her wealthy Wall Street boyfriend, or the complicated, emotionally fraught friendship she shares with her best friend, Reva. It is the year 2000, a time filled with glittering prosperity and seemingly limitless possibility—so why does she feel so unbearably miserable?

My Year of Rest and Relaxation masterfully explores exactly that question. In chronicling a year marked by an increasingly bizarre regimen of pharmaceuticals intended to shield our protagonist from feelings of alienation and grief, Moshfegh uncovers how alienation itself might sometimes be the sanest, even necessary, response to modern existence. At once witty and deeply unsettling, harsh yet honest, violent and tenderhearted, this astonishing novel showcases one of literature’s greatest contemporary talents writing at the absolute peak of her creative power.