New York Times bestselling novelist Ottessa Moshfegh has just released her fourth novel Lapvona (June 2022). Described as a ‘Gloomy Folk Horror’, the book follows a 13-year-old peasant boy named Marek as he navigates through a cruel and barbaric world. My Year of Rest and Relaxation was a literary phenomenon when it was released in 2018 and had a second wind during the pandemic as readers resonated with themes such a confinement and loneliness. The plot follows a young graduate as she consumes a concoction of carefully mediated prescription drugs in attempt to sleep through an entire year. Not for the faint-hearted! The internal ferocities within Moshfegh’s first-person narratives are swathed in dark humour and satire. In a 2020 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Moshfegh talks about the intensity of bringing her characters to life. “There’s this entity that’s not me but is of me and fashioned by someone else,” she notes, “I feel the psychic weight of that. It feels bad. It feels uncomfortable.”
Moshfegh’s first novel Eileen was shortlisted for the booker prize.
In a village in a medieval fiefdom buffeted by natural disasters, a motherless shepherd boy finds himself the unlikely pivot of a power struggle that puts all manner of faith to a savage test, in a spellbinding novel that represents Ottessa Moshfegh's most exciting leap yet.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation
A shocking and tender novel about a young woman's efforts to sustain a state of deep hibernation over the course of a year on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
While on her normal daily walk with her dog in the nearby forest woods, our protagonist comes across a note, handwritten and carefully pinned to the ground with a frame of stones.
The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman, trapped between her role as her alcoholic father's carer and her day job as a secretary at the prison.