A Most Anticipated Book of 2022 by The Millions • A Best Book to Read in April by Town & Country and The AV Club • One of 2022’s Best Beach Reads by Southern Living
“Read if you like: Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, artificial flavors, avoidant behavior, wondering what a 'lifestyle' is and whether you have one.” —Molly Young, The New York Times
“Utterly sharp, slyly humorous, and at times devastating in its courageous attempts to make sense of extreme loneliness. The Odyssey is a wildly original dystopian satire about the desire and struggle to forge human connection and the craving for some semblance of progress and order when one’s life has fallen apart. Startlingly unique and beautifully written.” —Frances Cha, author of If I Had Your Face
“Deliciously unpredictable . . . an entertaining examination of work, the lengths we go to feel a sense of belonging, and how difficult it can be to navigate the ever-shifting seas of friendship and love . . . I have never read anything like this, which is a testament to Lara Williams’s craft, as well as her fearlessness in diving into the more absurd, cringeworthy, and downright uncomfortable aspects of life.” —Mateo Askaripour, author of Black Buck
“This strange, beautiful cruise liner of a book interweaves a biting sendup of corporate, work, and wellness culture with an astute exploration of the emotional icebergs that lie below its protagonist's placid exterior . . . deeply unsettling and unexpectedly moving.” —Lydia Kiesling, author of The Golden State
“Tantalizing. . . . Readers who enjoy Melissa Broder and Ottessa Moshfegh will appreciate this surreal trip through a troubled woman’s psyche.” —Booklist
“Takes the reader on a memorable journey.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Vivid and compulsive . . . an addictive and intriguingly dark (if not profound) take on an ancient narrative.” —The New Statesman
“Big news: We already found your summer 2022 reading pick.” —Cosmopolitan
“Couldn't stop reading . . . Original and intriguing, I'll be digesting this one for a while.” —Laura Harvey, Copper Dog Books (MA)
“An intriguing twist on the epic voyage.” —Margo Grimm Eule, East City Bookshop (DC)
“An unflinching and razor-sharp satire exploring consumerism and the monotonous life of a disturbed and directionless woman working aboard a cruise ship. The Odyssey is a bleak and biting ride, with pitch-black humor and a progressively off-kilter protagonist. Reading it is a disorienting experience, with a hallucinogenic feel that becomes increasingly sobering as Ingrid nears closer and closer to her home: both on land, and within herself. Absolutely brilliant.” —Madison Gallup, Northshire Bookstore (VT)
“The Odyssey is a rueful antiheroine's journey full of dynamic absurdity that left me shell-shocked and clamoring for a higher page count. Supper Club catapulted Williams to the top of my (very short) must-read list and The Odyssey cements her place in the echelon. With its propulsive plot and macabre humor, the book is a fantastic send-up (takedown?) of modern life's knack of leaving us always craving more, more, more. If she keeps this up, I will follow Williams into the bowels of hell. Possibly lower.” —Wesley Minter, Third Place Books (WA)
“I love when writers like Lara Williams write an absurd novel like this, making you believe in this little world as if it made sense. . . . I was completely on board from the first page right up when she drops me off on the last.” —Emily Sperber, Third Place Books (WA)
“Perceptive, enigmatic and thought-provoking—I couldn't put it down. Wonderful!" —Amelia Horgan, author of Lost in Work
“This subversive satire on consumer capitalism and the millennial search for meaning is darkly comic existential fiction at its best.” —Culture Whisper (UK)
“A fever dream . . . Williams succeeds in satirising the seemingly unmockable: the overwhelming absurdities of modern life.” —Literary Review (UK)
2022-03-02
Aboard a luxury cruise ship, a woman is compelled to confront her past—and embrace her flaws.
“What you need to understand is that everything is coming out of and going into nothingness. That is the principle of wabi sabi,” Ingrid, the protagonist of Williams’ peculiar novel, is told by Keith, her boss aboard the vast luxury cruise liner on which she has lived and worked for the past five years, in the book’s opening passage. Williams has predicated the book’s plot on this idea of inevitable decay and deterioration, the acceptance (even the acceleration) of imperfection—yet elements of the story, like the concept behind it, can be challenging to embrace. For somewhat perplexing reasons, Ingrid has left her cozy bourgeois life with a loyal, loving husband, as well her well-appointed home and all her clothes and belongings, to move, with only the most minimal possessions, into a tiny room on a cruise ship and rotate through menial jobs, such as gift shop worker and manicure parlor manager. When she is at sea and not at work, Ingrid primarily spends her time peering moonily out through the small, sealed porthole in her tiny room or meeting up with her two friends, Mia and Ezra—a sister and brother who also rotate through jobs onboard—to eat bland leftovers in the crew mess, watch old sitcoms, or play Families, a game they’ve created in which they take turns being the mother, father, or doted-upon baby. “We all agreed being the baby was best,” Ingrid narrates. On land, she mostly drinks—a lot—and makes bad decisions. When Keith chooses Ingrid to participate in an eccentric mentoring program, she is forced to reckon with her past missteps, personal shortcomings, and painful losses—and things get really strange, leading to Ingrid’s degradation, but also possibly…growth?
Williams’ engaging novel takes the reader on a memorable journey, but its destination remains disappointingly unclear.
