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Jenny Offill, author of Weather

For years Lizzie Benson has tended to her God-haunted mother and her recovering addict brother. They have both stabilized for the moment, but Lizzie has little chance to spend her new free time with husband and son before her old mentor, Sylvia Liller, makes a proposal. She's become famous for her prescient podcast, “Hell and High Water,” and wants to hire Lizzie to answer the mail she receives: from left-wingers worried about climate change and right-wingers worried about the decline of western civilization. As Lizzie dives into this polarized world, she begins to wonder what it means to keep tending your own garden once you've seen the flames beyond its walls.

Week of January 18, 2021

Paperback releases for the week of January 18th include WESTWIND, a timeless cat-and-mouse classic from Edgar Award winner Ian Rankin that examines political tensions in an era of espionage; NEVER ASK ME by Jeff Abbott, a riveting tale of the dangerous secrets one family has concealed --- and what happens when the question each family member hoped they'd never be asked threatens to expose their darkest truths; FIGHT OF THE CENTURY, an anthology of essays curated by authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman about landmark cases in the 100-year history of the American Civil Liberties Union; and Emma Copley Eisenberg's THE THIRD RAINBOW GIRL, a stunning, complex narrative about the fractured legacy of a decades-old double murder in rural West Virginia --- and the writer determined to put the pieces back together.