As a librarian, Lizzie Benson has the perfect vantage point from which to practice her other calling--as a fake shrink. Her old mentor, Sylvia Liller, famous for her prescient podcast, "Hell and High Water," hires Lizzie to answer her mail-- from left-wingers worried about climate change and right-wingers worried about the decline of western civilization. As Lizzie researches answers, questions about her own world grow increasingly urgent.

“Offill’s fragmentary structure evokes an unbearable emotional intensity: something at the core of the story that cannot be narrated directly, by straight chronology, because to do so would be like looking at the sun…” —The New York Times