Offseason

Plunging you into the unique psyche of its narrator, this debut is told with hilarious, destabilising frankness and attention to detail. A “sexually frigid, spiritually sick and morally warped” PhD dropout arrives at an all-girls boarding school in a remote coastal tourist town to teach English and try to escape herself. As she meets local characters and teaches her students, her desire to outrun the past is undermined by her obsession with it. A triumph of striking language and observation from an assistant editor at American Short Fiction, who has been published in Granta and the Paris Review.