My Year of Rest and Relaxation

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh is one of the defining novels of its decade — a dark, funny, and deeply unsettling portrait of a young woman who, seemingly having everything, decides to sleep for a year. Armed with a cocktail of psychiatric medications prescribed by a cheerfully negligent doctor, Moshfegh’s nameless narrator attempts to absent herself from her own life in post-9/11 New York. The novel is at once a satire of American culture, a psychological case study, a meditation on numbness and grief, and a genuinely funny character study. Moshfegh’s prose is cool, precise, and darkly witty, creating a narrator who is self-aware enough to be interesting and self-destructive enough to be horrifying. Published by Vintage, this is essential contemporary fiction.