Watch it back - Bookclub webinar with author Jenny Offill

View all news


To celebrate World Environment Day 2020, Friends of the Earth hosted this bookclub event to discuss Jenny Offill's latest novel, Weather. With special guest, Irish writer and broadcaster, Sinéad Gleeson.

If you missed it, you can watch it back here at the link or at the video below.

Our friends, Books Upstairs in Dublin, have Jenny's new book in stock. You can order a copy by emailing shop@booksupstairs.ie. Let's support local!

Jenny Offill's latest book 'Weather' resonated with many of us on the Friends of the Earth team. It's not often you pick up a book and think, oh I know that story. And you hear so many others around you say that too!

"In Weather, the narrator Lizzie is an empathetic librarian, caring for her depressed addict brother and her young son but like Offill, Lizzie stays up at night researching the end of the world. All the anxieties of modern life are there: fear, then apathy, tending to the mundanities of life while the world burns.

"Offill realised that she suffered from a particular type of climate denial “to know it intellectually but to not have it affect you in a way that has more of an emotional charge”. The book became “a very novelist project of maybe wanting to make you feel something about this”. - Irish Times.

“Weather” is a novel reckoning with the simultaneity of daily life and global crisis, what it means for a woman to be all of these things: a mother packing her son’s backpack and putting away the dog’s “slobber frog,” a sister helping her recovering-addict brother take care of his infant daughter, and a citizen of a possibly doomed planet that might be a very different place for the son whose backpack she is packing, when he packs his own son’s backpack decades from now, or certainly when that someday-son does the same for his own children". - New York Times.

Stories help us make sense of the world, but they can also help us connect, sometimes connecting us with ourselves. Within the climate movement, we do lots of doing. It's also important to stop and reflect. We hope you will join us for this conversation which will touch on the more emotional and personal aspect of facing into the climate crisis.


Categorised in:
Webinars