Offseason

Offseason is the debut novel from Avigayl Sharp, and it was longlisted for the Center for Fiction 2026 First Novel Prize. Its narrator is sharp-eyed and badly deceived about herself. She has taken a teaching job at an all-girls boarding school on the Eastern Seaboard, where her lectures spiral away from the syllabus. One moment she is on Dickens's Bleak House, the next on the childhood mistreatment of Iosif Stalin, whom she adores, or on the way the Holocaust echoes down through generations. Outside the classroom she gets tangled up with the locals, including the male teacher whose position she inherited and who may have left under a cloud. She drags each of them into her fixated search for the point where her life went wrong. She swore she would never go back to the hometown she left in the middle of the country, but the holidays pull her home to her overbearing, poorly adjusted family. On the frozen afternoon of the seventh night of Chanukah, drunk in a bar, she runs into the person from her adolescence who may or may not have violated her and set her ruin in motion. Past and present crash together, yet no catharsis or closure follows, whether at the bar, in her childhood home, or in the tangled loops of her own thinking. The book is serious and irreverent at once, and it moves at a feverish pace. It takes a fresh look at how we talk about trauma, and it questions the doomed effort to "speak your truth" and the urge to repeat what hurt us. Underneath runs a larger question: can art and love actually change us?