Lara Williams

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Supper Club

The Odyssey

Penguin Shop: 3 Clothbound Classics for £33

Slyly poignant and wickedly funny... A serious vibe

Readers who enjoy Melissa Broder and Ottessa Moshfegh will appreciate this surreal trip through a troubled woman's psyche

Lara Williams is the queen of smart modern satire. I could read her all day

Williams succeeds in satirising the seemingly unmockable: the overwhelming absurdities of modern life...

I have never read anything like this... Deliciously unpredictable

Equal parts satire and elegy, coming from the very edge of the abyss... Unsettling, risk-taking, profoundly moving - I loved it

Astonishing, subversive and darkly funny - another dazzler of a novel from Lara Williams

Zeba Talkhani, author of 'My Past is a Foreign Country'

Slyly humorous, sharp, courageous and at times devastating... The Odyssey is a wildly original satire

Frances Cha, author of 'If I Had Your Face'

Ingrid has spent the past five years of her life working on the world's largest cruise ship. In that time, she has completed hundreds of meaningless tasks. She has watched dozens of long-term guests kick the bucket. She has made a grand total of two friends. And she has barely set foot on land. 
 
Now at last Ingrid has a chance to make something of herself. The ship's (highly myserious and reclusive) captain has chosen her, out of thousands of employees, to enter a special, secret club. All he asks in return is total co-operation...

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...

Lara Williams is the author of Treats, Supper Club and The Odyssey. Her fiction has won the Guardian 'Not the Booker' Prize and been nominated for the BBC National Short Story Award, the Republic of Consciousness Prize, the Edinburgh First Book Award, the Saboteur Awards and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Lara Williams lives in Manchester and is a contributor to the Guardian, Independent, Times Literary Supplement, Vice, Dazed and others.

The Odyssey

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