The Odyssey

Product Information

This was fantastic! The Odyssey is darkly funny and thought-provoking. Although I enjoyed the premise of Supper Club, I felt like Lara Williams linged on the surface. With The Odyssey, Lara Williams commits completely, this novel feels more direct and purposeful.

Tantalizing . . . Readers who enjoy Melissa Broder and Ottessa Moshfegh will appreciate this surreal trip through a troubled woman’s psyche.” - Booklist This subversive satire on consumer capitalism and the millennial search for meaning is darkly comic existential fiction at its best.” - Culture Whisper (UK) This book is bizarre and slightly confusing and dark at times, with a pretty unlikeable narrator and unlikeable characters, and I enjoyed reading it so much. I especially liked the way the narrator Ingrid would talk about her past while I as the reader had to kind of piece together what was missing, and I enjoyed how non-chalant the narrator was about some things that happened that she shouldn't have been non-chalant about. Ingrid is our narrator here. She works aboard the WA, a huge cruise ship that has been her whole world for several years now. She cycles through a rotation of jobs – gift shop employee, nail technician, lifeguard – and has only 2 friends, Mia and Ezra, with whom she plays disturbing and odd games. Her life and the novel itself is broken up by incidences of shore leave where she gets obliteratingly drunk and makes increasingly dangerous and unhinged decisions. On board the WA she has been chosen to be part of something referred to only as “The Program”. This is lead by an enigmatic man named Keith who encourages Ingrid to reveal the most intimate details of her past to him. Ingrid is a gift shop girl. Before that she was an IT technician, and before that a croupier, and before that a nursery nurse. She has worked on an enormous, luxury cruise liner for the past five years and in that time she has done more jobs than she can remember. She isn't good at any of them but she's good at pretending. And the endless maze-like corridors of the ship are the perfect place to forget the life she left behind on land and the person she used to be.

Advance Praise

Williams’ engaging novel takes the reader on a memorable journey, but its destination remains disappointingly unclear.

Perceptive, enigmatic and thought-provoking—I couldn’t put it down. Wonderful!” - Amelia Horgan, author of Lost in Work A book begging to be read on the beach, with the sun warming the sand and salt in the air: pure escapism.Told from the point of view of a narrator that you can't really trust, this book definitely delves into the "messy woman" genre that I have grown to love. The description compared it to the likes of Sally Rooney and Ottessa Moshfegh, but I would say that I wouldn't necessarily agree with those comparisons, and there's nothing quite like this book out there (at least that I've read). We all have that fiction trope that isn't for us. That fills us with rage. That, just, ruins everything. This is mine; this book was not for me. I didn't not enjoy the reading of most of it, but then that happened and now, if I'm honest, I'm going with: I really freaking hated this book.

Couldn’t stop reading . . . Original and intriguing, I’ll be digesting this one for a while.” - Laura Harvey, Copper Dog Books (MA) From the prize-winning author of Supper Club--a debut novel that Vogue called " Stephanie Danler's Sweetbitter meets Donna Tartt's The Secret History"--comes The Odyssey, a fresh twist on the epic journey and an unapologetic takedown of capitalism and "lifestyle" that will appeal to fans of Melissa Broder and Ottessa Moshfegh (Molly Young, New York Times)

Retailers:

So, there is this brand of fiction: "I'm disenfranchised and miserable and self-destructive; and join me for awhile and then I'll reveal my inciting incident and you can empathize with me." And, I'm not not here for that. I'm not an entirely unsympathetic human and I have the occasional millennial (Though let's not pretend for a second that this gen invented the trope, okay???) self-pitying instinct, so you know, I get the brand. Peculiarly uplifting … 1946 illustration of a scene from The Diary of a Nobody. Illustration: Culture Club/Getty Images 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 In New York City during the Great Depression, an unnamed male narrator responds to letters for his advice column, which he writes under the pen name “Miss Lonelyhearts”, in perhaps the ultimate book about a terrible job. Growing increasingly despondent and burdened by the miserable New Yorkers seeking his advice, Miss Lonelyhearts searches for ways to escape – through alcohol and religion to name a couple – as he barrels towards a full-blown existential crisis. A gorgeously written and pleasingly short and sharp satire.