Lizzie is a librarian at the university where she was once a promising graduate student. She dropped out years ago in an attempt to rescue her younger brother from the throes of addiction. But one day her old mentor, Sylvia, asks for a favor. She wants Lizzie to answer the mail for her famous doom-laden podcast, Hell and High Water. Soon she is fielding questions 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. And all the while the voices of the city keep floating in--funny, disturbing, and increasingly mad.

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It’s short and funny and absorbing, an effortless-seeming downhill ride that picks up astonishing narrative speed as it goes. What’s remarkable is that Offill achieves this effect using what you might call an experimental or avant-garde style of narration, one that we associate with difficulty and disorientation rather than speed and easy pleasure. Dept. of Speculation is all the more powerful because, with its scattered insights and apparently piecemeal form, it at first appears slight. Its depth and intensity make a stealthy purchase on the reader. A heartbreaking and exceptional book by a writer who doesn't settle for less. Dept. of Speculation is gorgeous, funny, a profoundly moving work of art. She gets life on the page in new, startling ways.

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