The Odyssey
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
From the prize-winning author of Supper Club comes a wickedly funny and slyly poignant new satire on modern life - for fans of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Convenience Store Woman, and J. G. Ballard's High Rise
'This book is a serious vibe' Cosmopolitan
'Lara Williams is the queen of smart modern satire. I could read her all day' Emma Jane Unsworth
Meet Ingrid. She works on a gargantuan luxury cruise liner, where she spends her days reorganizing the merchandise and waiting for long-term guests to drop dead in the changing rooms. On her days off, she disembarks from the ship and gets blind drunk on whatever the local alcohol is. It's not a bad life. And it distracts her from thinking about the other life she left behind five years ago.
Until one day she is selected for the employee mentorship scheme - an initiative run by the ship's mysterious captain and self-anointed lifestyle guru, Keith, who pushes Ingrid further than she thought possible. But sooner or later, she will have to ask herself: how far is too far?
Utterly original, mischievous and thought-provoking, The Odyssey is a merciless takedown of consumer capitalism and our anxious, ill-fated quests for something to believe in. And as its title suggests, it is a voyage that will eventually lead its unlikely heroine all the way home. Though she'd do almost anything to avoid getting there...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A young British woman employed on a surreal cruise ship is at the center of Williams's stylish if cold latest (after Supper Club). The protagonist, Ingrid, is devoted to her work aboard the WA, a gargantuan vessel with a "surf simulator, ice-skating rink, outdoor zip line," and floating restaurant, helmed by the mysterious Keith, a guru-like figure preoccupied by the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi. Ingrid shuffles through many onboard jobs, from working in a gift shop to the ship's nail salon, and, in the book's final third, to lifeguarding (ironic, since she can't swim). Early on she is inducted into a shadowy inner circle called "the program" in which she meets periodically with Keith to discuss wabi-sabi and recall traumatic memories from her past. Soon, she is promoted to a managerial role, a development that alienates her two closest friends. The prose is generally excellent and occasionally razor-sharp (describing Ingrid's pre-WA void, "The getting never really felt as good as the wanting, but the not-getting felt fucking catastrophic"); unfortunately, the plot is meagre and overly self-conscious. Ingrid belongs to a particular breed of disaffected, Moshfeghian narrator, but here there's more affect than substance. In the end, this feels eccentric for eccentricity's sake.
