Friends of the Earth Book Club with Jenny Offill, author of Weather

Start: 2020-06-05 20:00:00 UTC Greenwich Mean Time : Dublin, Edinburgh, Lisbon, London (GMT+00:00)

This is a virtual event

Join us in conversation with Jenny Offill, author of New York Times best seller, 'Weather'.

We're honoured to also have Irish writer, Sinéad Gleeson, on board as interviewer.

This event will be hosted over zoom, at 8pm on Friday June 5th to mark World Environment Day 2020.

We first came across Jenny's latest book earlier this year when we read this review in the Irish Times.

Listen back to Jenny Offill on RTE Arena earlier this year, here at this link.

"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.


This story really 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.

We're inviting you to join us to hear more from Jenny, and to also pause and reflect on the more personal and emotional aspect to facing climate change in the world today.

If you haven't yet read Jenny's latest book, you can order a copy from our friends at Books Upstairs (based in Dublin), they just got a big order in and can get a copy out to you in a few days. You can email shop@booksupstairs.ie to place an order. Let's support local business!

You will receive the link to join the webinar in an email after you register here.