of Speculation, the narrative is crafted from short, resonant passages, rarely longer than three or four sentences, that read like diary jottings, conversation fragments, jokes, quotations, trivia or poetry. Instead, the novel belongs to the everyday world of contemporary gentrifying Brooklyn. There are no large-scale emergencies, no heroic survivors there is no overt horror. Offill’s novel might best be called “pre-apocalyptic”. “But it was hard to see those pictures coming out of Australia in the last few weeks, or hear that a billion animals may have died, and not feel like that is what’s happening.” “‘Apocalypse’ is one of those words, like ‘fascism’, that immediately feels like an overstatement,” Offill says. Even the “zombie apocalypse” that Offill says crops up on doomsday-prepper websites is somehow more comprehensible than the ravages of climate breakdown.

When writers and artists have tackled the climate crisis, they’ve tended to come at it obliquely, through imagined dystopias.

At its core, the story asks: what happens after we start to pay attention? People feel undone by the sense that you have to have your own house together before you can join a bigger movement The novel follows Lizzie as she moves from “a state of twilight knowing” to a more conscious awareness of the crisis. In other words, she was curious how it was possible to be intellectually aware of an unfolding disaster without feeling emotionally connected or moved to action. “I became interested in why I wasn’t more interested,” Offill says, considering the question of why she chose to focus a novel around a subject many people find too vast and frightening to contemplate. Amid a growing sense of her own responsibility to the planet and fear for the future, Lizzie struggles to balance her responsibilities as a wife, mother, sister, daughter and friend. The job opens Lizzie’s eyes to the crisis and the myriad ways different people respond to it, from “dreary” environmentalists obsessed with composting toilets to “end-timers” eager to embrace the Rapture. Weather follows Lizzie, a university librarian, who responds to the emails sent in to “Hell or High Water”, a climate-focused podcast hosted by her former academic mentor. These fluctuations in the weather, and the warming trends they reveal, are increasingly unsettling reminders of the climate crisis, and they form the backbone of Offill’s latest novel, the follow-up to 2014’s bestselling Dept.

A couple of weeks earlier, the temperature was warm and spring-like. I t’s early January and freezing cold in New York when I meet Jenny Offill to talk about her new novel, Weather – an innocuous title for something that feels less innocuous every day.

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