My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Darkly hilarious... [Moshfegh’s] the kind of provocateur who makes you laugh out loud while drawing blood.

Vogue, **Must-Read Books of 2018**

Electrifying... [Moshfegh] is adept at crafting compelling female characters who violate the rules of femininity... Moshfegh’s protagonist is an unlikely revolutionary.

Vanity Fair

This is destined to be one of the summer’s most buzzed-about books.

Bookish

[The] premise makes me instantly want to reach for the book and hide with it for the next few hours.

Elle

Moshfegh’s sly new novel is… a strange, compelling tale of existential angst.

Mail on Sunday

Both refined and depraved… My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a page-turner.

New Yorker

The superabundantly talented...Moshfegh’s sentences are piercing and vixenish… she is always a deep pleasure to read.

New York Times

This may be the finest existential novel not written by a French author… A nervy modern-day rebellion tale that isn’t afraid to get dark or find humor in the darkness.

Kirkus Review

You’ll emerge from this darkly hilarious novel not necessarily rested or relaxed but more finely attuned to how delicately fraught the human condition can be.

Marie Claire

I was cringing during every moment of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and yet I could not put the book down... Moshfegh’s protagonist is brutally dreary, and the brutality of her dreariness is often very funny, but the book is really... about the realness of a more subtle and very private expression of pain.

Paris Review

Moshfegh’s ear remains as merciless as ever. Like a latter-day Flaubert, she delights in vanity and mediocrity, and in the absurdist heights both can reach whenever the occasion calls for a few sincere words.

Harper's Magazine

[Moshfegh] delights in creating fiction…like a magician who performs her best tricks without any props.

Lucian Robinson, Literary Review

My Year Of Rest And Relaxation is blisteringly funny, perceptive, knowing and shows how so many of us lead disaffected, alienated lives even without becoming narcotic recluses.

Red Online

It's not often that I pick up a book and get a new favorite author. But that's pretty close to what happened... She’s the real thing.

Arts Journal

A relentlessly savage fable of privilege and pain… While we’re laughing, we feel disgust. It’s a combination that makes for diamond-hard entertainment.

Guardian

Ottessa Moshfegh’s second novel is as arresting as her first… A study of alienation and dislocation, Ms Moshfegh's compelling novel is filled with warped desires and reckless pursuits, but also with wisdom and warmth.

Economist

[Ottessa Moshfegh] has been hailed in America as a saviour of literary fiction... she specialises in anti-heroines who won’t jump through the usual hoops of womanhood... [My Year of Rest of Relaxation is] the kind of wickedly funny book you can tear through in an afternoon.

Evening Standard

Ottessa Moshfegh pulls off an unlikely premise, demonstrating once again the unsettling energy, daring plotting and biting observations that have earned her literary prizes and praise from the start of her career.

Clare McHugh, Time

Viciously funny… Moshfegh’s writing is as lethally efficient as a flick-knife.

The Times

An arresting, original read… [Moshfegh] has a singular instinct for the jangled interiority of loners and outsiders… a scoop direct from the places to which the human mind plummets in private… This is a novel of immense and yet very ordinary human sadness. That is a lot to achieve.

Irish Times

Moshfegh’s blackly funny new novel… [hits] multiple marks at once: as an art-school prank, a between-the-lines tale of displaced grief and a pitiless anatomy of gender injustice, it also offers… a dark state-of-America fable.

Anthony Cummins, Observer

Moshfegh’s managed to produce a funny, acerbic and captivating novel from both a heroine we ought to hate (a rich kid bored with the life of plenty) and a plot that’s almost tautologically sedate (nap after blackout after nap after blackout)… it’s invigorating… what raises this book above the masses is Moshfegh’s wit, her invention, and her unflinching eye for the grotesque; anything could happen to our narrator and we’d keep on reading, because Moshfegh would make it sound unerringly interesting.

Valerie O’Riordan, Bookmunch

Ottessa Moshfegh is a merciless comedian of vanity and frailty.

Alex Clark, Spectator

There is no doubt that My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a magnificent satire… As ever, Moshegh shimmers with intelligence and wit.

Peter Carty, iNews

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is whip-smart, continuously compelling, and acerbic in all the right ways.

Daily Telegraph

Intoxicating… [My Year of Rest and Relaxation] is the boldest literary statement of passive resistance since Herman Melville’s scrivener… It speaks to Moshfegh’s storytelling skills that an account of someone sleep for a year is as gripping as My Year of Rest and Relaxation reads.

Lucy Scholes, Financial Times

The boldest literary statement of passive resistance since Herman Melville’s scrivener famously declared "I would prefer not to"… [a] deliciously dark and unsettling modern fairytale.

Financial Times

Savage, funny, frequently on the verge of teetering into lunacy… [My Year of Rest and Relaxation] is a non-negotiable in your holiday carry-on this summer.

Vogue

The book that everybody’s talking about… I read it and was entranced.

The Times

Ottessa Moshfegh’s unnerving and compelling new novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation… percussively hammered out in her flawless, rhythmic prose… concludes with a startlingly, unexpectedly beautiful passage… radical, urgent, and more painfully wise than perhaps we would like to admit.

Sam Byers, Times Literary Supplement

[Moshfegh is] one of America's brightest and brashest literary talents—and My Year of Rest and Relaxation is another bold assault on the status quo.

Josie Mitchell, Prospect

The writing is precise and hilarious, as well as disturbing and dark.

New Statesman

Moshfegh’s characters are often so funny in and about their unhappiness that we don’t want them to escape it, or not yet… My Year of Rest and Relaxation is written in multiple modes at once: comedy and tragedy and farce, blurring into one another, climbing on top of one another.

Anne Diebel, London Review of Books

A shocking, hilarious and strangely tender novel.

Jenna Rak, Glamour Magazine

[With] deadpan, unembellished prose recalling the cadences of Joan Didion and the clear-eyed candor of Mary Gaitskill… My Year of Rest and Relaxation is most convincing as an urbane dark comedy, sharp-eyed satire leavened by passages of morbid sobriety, as in a perverse fusion of Sex and the City and Requiem for a Dream.

Joyce Carol Oates, New York Review of Books

[My Year of Rest and Relaxation is] a laugh-out-loud page-turner... it’s also the best 9/11 novel I’ve read.

Emily Wilson, Times Literary Supplement **Books of the Year 2018**

This is the first book I couldn’t put down this year… Almost offensive with its close-to-the-bone truths, it’s shockingly relatable. And legitimately laugh-out-loud funny. Ottessa Moshfegh is sharp, savage and hilarious.

Isabel Dexter, Elle

I love this book. It's funny, I find it intriguing and Moshfegh has a dark voice. I started reading her and thought, 'This sounds like a female Bret Easton Ellis'.

Ellie Bamber, Stylist

Enthralling. The voice is compelling and witty, drawing one into the experience.

Shamika Tamhane, Cherwell Newspaper

The black comedy draws you in and the mysteries, twists and turns keep you there.

Wendy Bristow, Planet Mindful, *Summer Reads of 2019*

The best literary novel (and best book, full stop) that I read in 2019 was My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh. It is that incredibly rare book hyped as being "hilarious" which is actually funny... It's also a devastating satire of WASP culture, psychiatrists and New York.

Adrian McKinty, Sunday Independent **Books of the Year**

Whip-smart and bleakly funny.

Chloe Ashby, Monocle

The most inspiring novel of recent years.

Eva Wiseman, Observer

Depressing, dystopian, dry and dark, but also strangely comforting and full of the joy of innocent fantasy of withdrawing from a hostile world.

Sam Knowles and Sam Waters, NARC

Moshfegh's stunning 2018 novel has a haunting ending... [and] relentlessly vicious humour.

Gwendolyn Smith

This razor sharp satirical novel has achieved near mythical status... [a] compelling and clever take on a female character that isn't afraid to speak her mind

Glamour

Ottessa is one of our newest, most dazzling, daring and outrageous voices in literature

Gwendoline Christie, Vogue