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Worry

A Novel

by Alexandra Tanner

Narrator Helen Laser

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Length 7 hours 13 minutes

Language English

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Bookseller recommendation

“Insidious millennial malaise and the exhaustion of performative activism are contrasted through the story of two sisters who overstay their welcome in one another’s orbit. The dialogue will split you, gut you, and stitch you back up again.”
— Kyle Rea • Greenlight Bookstore

Bookseller recommendation

“Worry is brilliant. Jules and Poppy's characters could be your sister, your friend, or even, you. The storyline time placement is genius. All Jules and Poppy appear to want is to move their lives forward – together and apart. But with setting this story a year before the pandemic, the reader knows it really doesn't matter what they are planning. The family dynamic is pure chaos. The struggle with mother-daughter-sister relationships felt true and unbelievable at the same time. I felt so many emotions during the interactions between Jules and Poppy, Poppy and Mom, and Jules and Mom that I'm officially on 'Team Poppy'. Tanner's writing style is direct and doesn't linger, which felt natural and relatable the entire time. (Not recommended for readers who need a plot device to move the story forward). ”
— Jenny • E. Shaver, bookseller

Summary
About the author

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

A “dryly witty” (The New Yorker) and “fabulously revealing” (The New York Times Book Review) debut that follows two sisters-turned-roommates navigating an absurd world on the verge of calamity—a Seinfeldian novel for readers of Ottessa Moshfegh and Sally Rooney.

It’s March of 2019, and twenty-eight-year-old Jules Gold—anxious, artistically frustrated, and internet-obsessed—has been living alone in the apartment she once shared with the man she thought she’d marry when her younger sister Poppy comes to crash. Indefinitely. Poppy, a year and a half out from a suicide attempt only Jules knows about, searches for work and meaning in Brooklyn while Jules spends her days hate-scrolling the feeds of Mormon mommy bloggers and waiting for life to happen.

Then the hives that’ve plagued Poppy since childhood flare up. Jules’s uterus turns against her. Poppy brings home a maladjusted rescue dog named Amy Klobuchar. The girls’ mother, a newly devout Messianic Jew, starts falling for the same deep-state conspiracy theories as Jules’s online mommies. Jules, halfheartedly struggling to scrape her way to the source of her ennui, slowly and cruelly comes to blame Poppy for her own insufficiencies as a friend, a writer, and a sister. And Amy Klobuchar might have rabies. As the year shambles on and a new decade looms near, a disastrous trip home to Florida forces Jules and Poppy—comrades, competitors, constant fixtures in each other’s lives—to ask themselves what they want their futures to look like, and whether they’ll spend them together or apart.

“A tragicomic portrait of urban millennial life” (Shelf Awareness), Worry is a “riotously funny and wryly existential” (Harper’s Bazaar) novel of sisterhood from a nervy new voice in contemporary fiction.

Fiction Humor Fiction - Literary

Alexandra Tanner is a Brooklyn-based writer and editor. She is a graduate of the MFA program at The New School and a recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, The Center for Fiction, and Spruceton Inn’s Artist Residency. Her writing appears in Granta, The New York Times Book Review, The Baffler, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Jewish Currents, among other outlets. Worry is her first novel.