Offseason

A cynical PhD dropout tries to make do in her new digs at a girl’s boarding school, in Sharp’s distinctive debut. It’s winter and the unnamed narrator has traveled to a seaside tourist town somewhere in the Northeast, where she’s been hired to teach English literature. On double doses of her prescription stimulants, she lectures on subjects she’s obsessed with, such as the life of Stalin and Dickens’s Bleak House, noting how the students “stared back at me with the vacant curiosity of idiot fish whose aquarium had just been tapped by a finger.” As the narrator settles in at the school, where “every year the cottages sank another inch into the earth,” she befriends quirky students like Cordelia and begins dating fellow teacher Thomas, who’s recently returned from leave, which he claims was due to a family illness. The lightly plotted narrative casts a spell on the reader, thanks to Sharp’s powers of observation and the narrator’s eccentric disposition, as when her seatmate on a train pretends he’s sleeping and plays footsie with her, and she welcomes the touch. This pensive and offbeat work is an acquired taste. Agent: Kent Wolf, Neon Literary. (May)