Offseason - May 2026 FRESH INK Edition

About the book

A blisteringly funny and transcendently deranged debut novel for fans of Ottessa Moshfegh, Patricia Lockwood and George Saunders

'Obscenely good and very funny' CATHERINE LACEY
'A startling fever dream of a novel' LUCY ROSE
'So smart, weird and eerie . . . 'I recommend everyone to buy it when it comes out' MADELINE CASH, author of Lost Lambs


A blisteringly funny and transcendently deranged debut novel following a young woman who takes a job at an all-girls boarding school in a small coastal town to teach English literature - and to try, desperately, to escape the trap that is herself.

In Offseason, our fiercely observant but self-deluded narrator finds herself teaching at an all-girls boarding school in a remote coastal town. In between manic lectures that veer from Charles Dickens's Bleak House to the childhood maltreatment of her beloved Iosif Stalin and the generational legacy of the Holocaust, she implicates everyone she meets in her quest to pin down where exactly her own life went wrong.

Though she's vowed never to return to her hometown, the holiday season sends her careening back into the orbit of her overbearing family. The past collides with the present - but catharsis and closure are nowhere to be found. Certainly not in the unruly spirals of her mind.

Obsessed with her own trauma and the trauma - real or imagined - of everyone around her, and her quest to escape from her past is undermined by her inability to ever stop talking about it.

Serious and wise yet written with a delirious velocity, Offseason marks the arrival of a fiercely original literary talent.

'You've never read anything like it' ELIZABETH McCRACKEN

'Yes, Offseason is hilarious, eccentric and gleefully mean-spirited, but just when you think you know what Sharp is doing, she will shatter your heart. I haven't read something so incisive, so slyly tender in years' LISA McINERNEY

'To let us see the world reinvented through the eyes of a narrator who makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar, to have us laugh at what is painful and feel compassion when the narrator is lighting firecracker sentences to get us to look elsewhere-this is the eternal promise of the literary first novel. In Offseason, Avigayl Sharp fulfils that promise, amply, and with art and wit'
MICHAEL CHABON, author of Moonglow