My Year of Rest and Relaxation

By: Ottessa Moshfegh

Narrated by: Julia Whelan

Random House presents the audiobook edition of My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, read by Julia Whelan.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WELLCOME BOOK PRIZE 2019

FROM THE MAN BOOKER-SHORTLISTED AUTHOR OF EILEEN

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

'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

It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?

Our narrator has many of the advantages of life: Young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, she lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like everything else, by her inheritance. But there is a vacuum at the heart of things, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents in college, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her alleged best friend.

Blackly funny, both merciless and compassionate – dangling its legs over the ledge of 9/11 – My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a showcase for the gifts of one of America’s major young writers.

Critic reviews

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

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)

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

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

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

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.

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

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)

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

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.

Bizarre but intoxicating and compelling

The performance is brilliant, and it matches the benignly self centered main character. I have never found this unsympathetic a character this compelling before.

Best audible experience in a while

Failure after failure, disappointment after disappointment, this book saved me from that slump. It's unique and compelling and nauseating and well-written, and the reader was great. If you think a good book hinges on the need for a female main character to be a puppy-saving baby-kissing tepid wash basin full of greywater then I wouldn't recommend this book, but if you like thinking critically then I would.

Shallow Character

Do not understand what the author was trying to tell us here. The performance was good though

The plot led nowhere and nothing happened

A book about unkind privileged people, being unkind and privileged and then 9/11 happens. The end.

Just didn’t connect

I hoped for more. Such an interesting main character but I didn’t feel the story developed in a way that was interesting or thought provoking.