26@26: Amitava Kumar & Jenny Offill

In this age of lies, can we rely on fiction to cover the facts? Amitava Kumar’s entertaining and incisive A Time Outside This Time provides a convincing answer. This novel is both necessary and beautiful.” –Cheryl Strayed, bestselling author of Wild and Brave Enough

From the acclaimed author of Immigrant, Montana, a one-of-a-kind novel about fake news, memory, and the ways in which truth can be not only stranger than fiction, but a fiction of its own.

When a writer named Satya attends a prestigious artist retreat, he finds the pressures of the outside world won't let up: President Trump rages online; a dangerous virus envelopes the globe; and the 24-hour news cycle throws fuel on every fire. For most of the retreat fellows, such stories are unbearable distractions; but for Satya, these Orwellian interruptions begin to crystalize into an idea for his new novel, Enemies of the People, about the lies we tell ourselves and each other. Satya scours his life for moments where truth bends toward the imagined, and misinformation is mistaken as fact.

Sifting through newspaper clippings, the President's tweets, childhood memories from India, and moments as an immigrant, a husband, father, and teacher, A Time Outside This Time captures our feverish political moment with intelligence, beauty, and an eye for the uncanny. It is a brilliant meditation on life in a post-truth era. In the midst of the global pandemic, stretching on indefinitely, this piercing novel flawlessly captures the sentiment on everyone's mind of how impossible it can feel to remember, or to imagine, a time outside of this one.

Genius... Remarkable and resonant... The right novel for the end of the world.” –Los Angeles Times

From the beloved author of the nationwide best seller Dept. of Speculation comes a “darkly funny and urgent” (NPR) tour de force about a family, and a nation, in crisis.

Lizzie works in the library of a university where she was once a promising graduate student. Her side hustle is answering the letters that come in to Hell and High Water, the doom-laden podcast hosted by her former mentor. At first it suits her, this chance to practice her other calling as an unofficial shrink – she has always played this role to her divorced mother and brother recovering from addiction – but soon Lizzie finds herself struggling to strike the obligatory note of hope in her responses. The reassuring rhythms of her life as a wife and mother begin to falter as her obsession with disaster psychology and people preparing for the end of the world grows. A marvellous feat of compression, a mix of great feeling and wry humour, Weather is an electrifying encounter with one of the most gifted writers at work today.