Offseason

by Avigayl Sharp

A blisteringly funny and transcendently deranged debut novel following a young woman who takes a job at an all-girls boarding school in a small coastal town to teach English literature—and to try, desperately, to escape the trap that is herself.

In Avigayl Sharp’s brilliant and bold debut novel, Offseason, our fiercely observant but self-deluded narrator finds herself teaching at an all-girls boarding school on the Eastern Seaboard. In between manic lectures that veer from Charles Dickens’s Bleak House to the childhood maltreatment of her beloved Iosif Stalin and the generational legacy of the Holocaust, she consorts and canoodles with the town’s locals—including the possibly disgraced male teacher whose job she’s taken over—implicating everyone she meets in her obsessive quest to pin down where, exactly, her own life went wrong.

Though she's vowed never to return to her hometown in the middle of the country, the holiday season sends her careening back into the orbit of her overbearing, maladjusted family. Drunk at a bar on the frigid afternoon of the seventh night of Chanukah, she encounters the figure from her adolescence who may or may not be responsible for violating her, bringing her down, and ruining her life. The past collides with the present—but catharsis and closure are nowhere to be found. Not at the bar. Not in her childhood home. And certainly not in the unruly spirals of her mind.

Serious yet irreverent with a delirious velocity, Offseason reimagines the conversation around trauma while reckoning with the doomed project of “speaking your truth,” the compulsion to repeat, and whether we can be transformed by art and love.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Literary Fiction

304 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication May 5, 2026

Reviews

[Gergely · Rating 5 out of 5]

Offseason is one of those rare novels that grabs you instantly and doesn’t let go. I flew through it. Not just because the writing is sharp and propulsive, but because the protagonist is so bizarrely, brilliantly herself.
The story follows a young woman who moves to a small town on the Eastern Seaboard for a short-term teaching job at a private academy. Instead of the fresh start she imagines, the isolation and strangeness of the off-season campus push her deeper into her own obsessive inner world. She fixates on the Holocaust, her family’s knot of trans-generational trauma, Stalin, pedophiles - dark, thorny subjects that in another novel might weigh things down. Here, they become part of a voice so incisive and unexpectedly funny that I found myself laughing out loud at moments that should, by all logic, be grim.
What I loved most is how the book balances emotional discomfort with wicked humor. Her intellectual rabbit holes don’t feel like quirks for color, they’re the exact machinery through which she tries (and often fails) to make sense of her own anxiety, history, and desire. It’s unsettling, illuminating, and deeply human.
The pacing is electric, the voice unforgettable, and the blend of seriousness and comedy is pulled off with a precision that feels effortless. I finished it wishing I could read it again for the first time.
If you like fiction that’s strange, smart, unflinching, and genuinely funny, Offseason is a knockout.
5⭐️
Thanks to NetGalley and Astra House for the eARC in exchange for an honest review.

[James B · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thanks to Netgalley and Astra House for the ebook. We follow a young woman who gets a last minute gig to teach at an all girls school in New England. In a time where you would never make students read a long novel, she assigns Dicken’s nearly thousand page Bleak House (one student later asks her, Can’t you tell we’re just pretending to have read it?). And then while teaching she constantly talks about pedophiles, the miserable upbringing of Stalin, who is a favorite of hers, and her family’s personal history of the Holocaust. She’s such a fascinating character. She seems to enjoy talking to one of the town’s transients, who never remembers her later, than anyone else. She thinks the teacher she’s replacing for the year may have had an inappropriate relationship with one of the students and then starts an affair with him. She swears she’ll never go home again and then goes home Christmas break and goes out to a bar and starts making out with a childhood acquaintance who she says abused her and ruined her life. It’s not always clear what to believe, but it’s amazing to be in her head as she’s constantly full of praise and apologies to everyone she meets, but so blisteringly mean and inappropriate in her thoughts.

[m. · Rating 2 out of 5]

(1.5/5)

eARC provided by Netgalley in exhange for an honest review.

I've recently read Sharp's short stories, and enjoyed most of them, which was what motivated me to request this arc. It's interesting to see how her favorite themes web and evolve through her writing. This novel has quite a few similarities to her other work, but where before the narrative flowed well and seemed consistent and realistic, Offseason crashes and burns.

I tried my best to give this a fair chance, even as I've slowly become disillusioned with what people call "Sad Girl Literature." I think that's a disgusting term, but I can't think of another thing to call this subgenre that, by all regards, Sharp fits perfectly well into. Offseason has themes that I've become familiar with after reading Moshfegh, Broder, and other contemporaries. But Sharp lacks the imagination and refinement to make them work. There is no subtlety in this book. One or two passages are funny, some function appropriately well as character development, but none of it is really convincing, and none of it sticks. The narrator is a simple compilation of edgy traits that are meant to portray her loss of seemingly every mannerism and opinion a normal human being would have, but it is so extreme that she becomes a caricature of herself.

Being inside her head is exhausting. For a long time I couldn't read more than a page without sighing and closing my kindle. Think of the most negative and cynical person you know: I imagine this is what the inside of their head must sound like, and it is harrowing to be in it.

But it's not just that's the narrator is fatalistic—it's that everything about this book seems lazy and hastily thrown together. It's got a strong concept, some interesting side characters (Thomas and Cordelia), and I think it could work in a different context, but it is a drag to read. The style is nothing impressive, and Sharp uses narrative tools which are basic and predictable. I feel like I've read this novel before, but now it's screaming in my face and banging a drum next to my ears and it won't let me rest.

No character behaves normally. Sharp exaggerates and stretches beyond the realm of belief. No action or thought process goes where it should; nothing in this really makes any kind of sense. And it's not in a unreliable narrator—drugged up daze—manic episode way. It's in the author's choice of words and sentence structures. It's seeped into the fabric of the story itself, and it's impossible to scrub clean.

[Sophia Eck · Rating 3 out of 5]

Offseason, aptly named for its narrative taking place during a tourist town’s offseason, is about our narrator and main character, a grating and self concerned young woman, who has recently moved out of her parents house to take a job teaching at an all-girls boarding school in the east of The United States, in an isolated small town near the sea. Our protagonist is quite overtly unlikable but in an intriguing sense, similar to the main characters of novels like “Pizza Girl” or the soon to be released “Just Watch Me”; She is forceful with her hyperfixations, weirdly forward with her own lore, and really just gets through her life and her job in increasingly impulsive and unpredictable ways on her journey to come to terms with herself and her own history. I found the writing to be very promising for a debut novel, lots of collectible clever lines, a meandering but not dragging narrative, and enough sudden unsettling inserts to keep things interesting, albeit a little nasty. The ARC copy I read definitely had a lot of formatting issues (missing spaces, dashes, unneeded step downs), but otherwise felt balanced in chapter length and pace. Our protagonist’s unorthodox interests and hyperfixations, though often coming across as overly quirky, at other times, primarily in her obsession with the novel “Bleak House”, were an interesting tool to explore our characters own cognition of her pock-holed memory and trauma. Overall, despite its tendency to often fall into the literary ditch of “overtly unlikable women” so topical these days (common in Moshfegh, Awad, and Broder, etc.), I found this novel to be a promising debut that I think a lot of literary fiction fans, especially women who read primarily litfic, will eat up for sure and find decently poignant.

[verynicebook · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was brilliant. I love when main characters make strange observations or reveal their truest, weirdest selves to us as readers. It feels as if we’re inhabiting them for a while, experiencing every odd thought and uncomfortable feeling right alongside them. The MC is written almost like an otherworldly being, much like the characters in Yorgos Lanthimos’s films, who behave as if they’re otherworldly themselves, trying to blend into human life. Offseason is a hilarious and introspective debut that reminded me a lot of the works of authors such as Ottessa Moshfegh, Halle Butler and Melissa Broder, especially in the way the characters evolve and deliver their inner monologues. There’s a similar sense of grossness, taboo thoughts, and unfiltered behaviour. It’s awkwardly funny, almost absurdist. Offseason was delightfully unhinged, yet dreamy and thoughtful at the same time. I wholeheartedly enjoyed this and inhaled it in two sittings! I look forward to read more from Avigayl Sharp In the future.

Thanks so much to Astra House for providing my review copy in exchange for an honest review. This is definitely up there in my all-time favourite reads of 2025.

[Savana · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unfortunately, this book was not for me. Even after completing the novel, I couldn't tell you the clear plot. I am not sure if it is my ADHD or if the book was just so sporadic, but I could not follow it at all. I kept feeling as if I was missing key information vital to the plot. The book follows the thoughts of a teacher who moved away from her family to teach at an all-girls academy. She returns to her family home over winter break, but the main character's thoughts were so sporadic and all over the place that I felt like I was getting whiplash.

Thank you, Netgalley, for an ARC.

[EatRdyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Huge thanks to NetGalley and Astra House for the ARC! To be honest, this one just wasn't for me. I really liked the writing style and getting to see inside the narrator's head, but I couldn't get into the main character. Between the constant mentions of Stalin and the weird study habits, She just weren't very likable or convincing as a teacher. There were also quite a few typos that still need to be cleaned up. Thanks again for the opportunity

[Blanca · Rating 2 out of 5]

I just wasn’t the audience for this book. I finished it but I couldn’t really tell you what it was about or what even happened. It was repetitive and scattered and I couldn’t keep up or stay very focused. I didn’t like any of the characters. The main character’s introspective thoughts made me feel claustrophobic. Again, I just wasn’t the audience for it. 1.5 but I rounded it up to 2

[Taylor]

Really not for me, but I see the appeal. The narration is really interesting insular and isolated and that’s also reflected in how they perceive the world, which is cool. Not really dark academia vibes if that’s important to you. Dark New England vibes for sure though.

[Remi]

i do have a thing for debut novels talking about literature

*thank you to Astra House for the ARC*