The 7 books on this stack
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My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Ottessa Moshfegh · 2019
Read THE savagely funny razor-sharp satire of a woman looking out from the abyss. 'When I'd slept enough, I'd be okay. I'd be renewed, reborn.' On the surface, our narrator has everything you could want in life. She's young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate and lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like everything else, by her inheritance. But there is a vacuum in her life, and she's got the perfect solution. She's going to take a year under sedation to relax and hide away from the world. What could possibly go wrong? Blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, is the perfect read for fans of The Secret History by Donna Tartt and 'The book that everyone is talking about' The Times 'Diamond-hard entertainment' Guardian 'Electrifying...compelling...Moshfegh's protagonist is an unlikely revolutionary' Vanity Fair
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Sorrow and Bliss
Meg Mason · 2022
Winner of the Book of the Year (Fiction) at the British Book Awards Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction "Brilliantly faceted and extremely funny. . . . While I was reading it, I was making a list of all the people I wanted to send it to, until I realized that I wanted to send it to everyone I know." — Ann Patchett The internationally bestselling, compulsively readable novel—a work of spiky, sharp, intriguingly dark comedy that combines the psychological insight of Sally Rooney with the sharp humor of Nina Stibbe and the emotional resonance of Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine. Martha Friel just turned forty. She used to work at Vogue and was going to write a novel. Now, she creates internet content for no one. She used to live in Paris. Now, she lives in a gated community in Oxford that she hates and can’t bear to leave. But she must now that her loving husband Patrick has just left. Because there’s something wrong with Martha. There has been for a long time, an unnamed mental illness since a little bomb went off in her brain, at seventeen, leaving her changed in a way no doctor or drug could fix then and no one, even now, can explain—why can say she is so often sad, cruel to everyone she loves, why she finds it harder to be alive than other people. With Patrick gone, the only place Martha has left to go is her childhood home, the heart of a chaotic family drama, to live with her chaotic parents, to survive without Ingrid, the sister who made their growing-up bearable, who said she would never give up on Martha, and who finally has. It feels like the end but maybe, by going back, Martha will get to start again. Maybe there is a different story to be written, if Martha can work out where to begin.
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Educated
Tara Westover · 2018
For readers of The Glass Castle and Wild, a stunning new memoir about family, loss and the struggle for a better future #1 International Bestseller Tara Westover was seventeen when she first set foot in a classroom. Instead of traditional lessons, she grew up learning how to stew herbs into medicine, scavenging in the family scrap yard and helping her family prepare for the apocalypse. She had no birth certificate and no medical records and had never been enrolled in school. Westover’s mother proved a marvel at concocting folk remedies for many ailments. As Tara developed her own coping mechanisms, little by little, she started to realize that what her family was offering didn’t have to be her only education. Her first day of university was her first day in school—ever—and she would eventually win an esteemed fellowship from Cambridge and graduate with a PhD in intellectual history and political thought.
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The Wedding People
Alison Espach · 2025
"It's a beautiful day in Newport, Rhode Island, when Phoebe Stone arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn wearing a green dress and gold heels, not a bag in sight, alone. She's immediately mistaken by everyone in the lobby for one of the wedding people, but she's actually the only guest at the Cornwall who isn't here for the big event. Phoebe is here because she's dreamed of coming for years--she hoped to shuck oysters and take sunset sails with her husband, only now she's here without him, at rock bottom, and determined to have one last decadent splurge on herself. Meanwhile, the bride has accounted for every detail and every possible disaster the weekend might yield except for, well, Phoebe and Phoebe's plan--which makes it that much more surprising when the two women can't stop confiding in each other. In turns absurdly funny and devastatingly tender, Alison Espach's The Wedding People is ultimately an incredibly nuanced and resonant look at the winding paths we can take to places we never imagined--and the chance encounters it sometimes takes to reroute us"--
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Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine
Gail Honeyman · 2017
A REESE WITHERSPOON x HELLO SUNSHINE BOOK CLUB PICK #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER USA Today 's top 100 books to read while stuck at home social distancing A Penguin Book Club Pick “Beautifully written and incredibly funny. . . I fell in love with Eleanor; I think you will fall in love, too!” —Reese Witherspoon Smart, warm, uplifting, the story of an out-of-the-ordinary heroine whose deadpan weirdness and unconscious wit make for an irresistible journey as she realizes the only way to survive is to open her heart. No one's ever told Eleanor that life should be better than fine. Eleanor Oliphant is, well, a bit of an oddball--albeit a loveable one. She struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she's thinking . . . and that, combined with her unusual appearance (scarred cheek, a tendency to wear the same clothes year after year), means that Eleanor has become a bit of a loner. But for Eleanor, nothing really important is missing in her carefully timetabled life of avoiding perplexing social interactions, where weekends are punctuated by frozen pizza, Glen's Vodka, and phone chats with "Mummy." But everything changes when Eleanor meets Raymond, the bumbling and sweet IT guy from her office. When she and Raymond together save Sammy, an elderly gentleman who has fallen on the sidewalk, the three become the kind of friends who rescue one another from the lives of isolation they have each been living. And it is Raymond's big heart that will ultimately help Eleanor find the way to repairing her own damaged one. Smart, warm, and uplifting , Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine is the story of a quirky yet lonely woman whose social misunderstandings and deeply ingrained routines could be changed forever--if she can bear to confront the secrets she has avoided all her life. But if she does, she'll learn that she, too, is capable of finding friendship--and even love--after all, if only she can learn to open her heart.
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Lessons in Chemistry
Bonnie Garmus · 2022
Set in 1960s California, this blockbuster debut is the hilarious, idiosyncratic and uplifting story of a female scientist whose career is constantly derailed by the idea that a woman's place is in the home, only to find herself starring as the host of America's most beloved TV cooking show.
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Convenience Store Woman
Sayaka Murata · 2019
Shortlisted for the Best Translated Book Award Longlisted for the Believer Book Award Longlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation A Los Angeles Times Bestseller The English-language debut of an exciting young voice in international fiction, selling 660,000 copies in Japan alone, Convenience Store Woman is a bewitching portrayal of contemporary Japan through the eyes of a single woman who fits into the rigidity of its work culture only too well. The English-language debut of one of Japan’s most talented contemporary writers, selling over 650,000 copies there, Convenience Store Woman is the heartwarming and surprising story of thirty-six-year-old Tokyo resident Keiko Furukura. Keiko has never fit in, neither in her family, nor in school, but when at the age of eighteen she begins working at the Hiiromachi branch of “Smile Mart,” she finds peace and purpose in her life. In the store, unlike anywhere else, she understands the rules of social interaction—many are laid out line by line in the store’s manual—and she does her best to copy the dress, mannerisms, and speech of her colleagues, playing the part of a “normal” person excellently, more or less. Managers come and go, but Keiko stays at the store for eighteen years. It’s almost hard to tell where the store ends and she begins. Keiko is very happy, but the people close to her, from her family to her coworkers, increasingly pressure her to find a husband, and to start a proper career, prompting her to take desperate action… A brilliant depiction of an unusual psyche and a world hidden from view, Convenience Store Woman is an ironic and sharp-eyed look at contemporary work culture and the pressures to conform, as well as a charming and completely fresh portrait of an unforgettable heroine.