NATIONAL BESTSELLER
A "dryly witty" (New Yorker) and "fabulously revealing" (TheNew York Times Book Review) debut about two siblings-turned-roommates navigating an absurd world on the verge of calamity—a Seinfeldian novel of existentialism and sisterhood.
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.
Deadpan, dark, and brutally funny, Worry is a sharp portrait of two sisters enduring a dread-filled American moment from a nervy new voice in contemporary fiction.
Genre: Literary Fiction
A "dryly witty" (New Yorker) and "fabulously revealing" (TheNew York Times Book Review) debut about two siblings-turned-roommates navigating an absurd world on the verge of calamity—a Seinfeldian novel of existentialism and sisterhood.
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.
Deadpan, dark, and brutally funny, Worry is a sharp portrait of two sisters enduring a dread-filled American moment from a nervy new voice in contemporary fiction.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Praise for this book
"With a voice that hooks us on page one, Alexandra Tanner takes us on a dark, brilliantly insightful, consistently hilarious tour of contemporary America's desperate graspings after meaning, from A to Q(anon) and back again. But it is the richly drawn, deeply affecting portrait of two siblings striving to love each other in this strange moment in history that makes this one of the most exciting literary debuts - and just one of the flat-out best novels - in memory. You should read Alexandra Tanner, because she's already reading you." - David Burr Gerrard
"Alexandra Tanner's Worry is a furiously funny, delirious anxiety spiral of a book - a novel of ideas with a bad case of insomnia, written in a voice that is brilliant and electric. Poppy and Jules are a modern-day Vladimir and Estragon, waiting for the endless scroll of life to make sense. And what wonderful company they are: the detritus of their tangents and distractions coalesces into blistering prose that barrels through the narcissism of daily life, landing somewhere startling, original, and true." - Hilary Leichter
"Alexandra Tanner chronicles all the grime, horror, and mess of sisterhood without once losing sight of its beauty and humor. I want to make all of my friends read Worry and then take them to a bar so we can fight about which sister is right and which is worse and which is moral and which is me. A moody beach read for girls who hate their jobs, text their exes, and feel like the things they want will destroy them." - Kelsey McKinney
"Reading Worry felt like finding a strange jawbone on the beach. Tanner's novel is animal, salty, and deeply pleasurable to worry in my hands. This is a dark and laugh-out-loud funny debut about sisterhood, internet poisoning, and suspecting that there is something incurably wrong with you but not wanting to know what it is (relatable!). Worry homes all the trappings of our times that have nowhere else to go: tradwife influencers, Jewish survivor guilt, the boy who threatened to kill you in seventh grade and is now organizing your high school reunion. Good luck reading this book without underlining every other sentence - it slapped me across the face and then held an ice pack to my cheek until the swelling went down." - Ruth Madievsky
"This book is like popping an Adderall and discovering the beauty of your food processor. Everything is so interesting! Everything is so funny! How long have I been crying? When I emerged, blinking, back into my own life, I hardly knew what was real; I never wanted to leave this vividly-imagined world. But what a relief to discover I hadn't ordered two hundred dollars' worth of candles on Amazon!" - Beth Morgan
"What a biting and brilliant novel. I couldn't put it down. Worry writes toward truth in the time of the internet, it uncovers the absolute horror of 'buying things,' and it does what novels are meant to do: hauntingly display the dark and familiar sides of human behavior. Worry is the best thing I've read in a very long time." - Kiley Reid
"Worry is an excellent, excellent comic novel, a proper laugh-until-you-cough onslaught of horrible manners, toxic relatives, internet vomit, and hilariously maimed pets. I've spent my whole life desperately trying not to say the stuff that comes out of these characters' mouths. A book that's impossible to read without annoying your friends with constant quotations. But who needs friends when you've got this book?" - Tony Tulathimutte
"Alexandra Tanner's Worry is a furiously funny, delirious anxiety spiral of a book - a novel of ideas with a bad case of insomnia, written in a voice that is brilliant and electric. Poppy and Jules are a modern-day Vladimir and Estragon, waiting for the endless scroll of life to make sense. And what wonderful company they are: the detritus of their tangents and distractions coalesces into blistering prose that barrels through the narcissism of daily life, landing somewhere startling, original, and true." - Hilary Leichter
"Alexandra Tanner chronicles all the grime, horror, and mess of sisterhood without once losing sight of its beauty and humor. I want to make all of my friends read Worry and then take them to a bar so we can fight about which sister is right and which is worse and which is moral and which is me. A moody beach read for girls who hate their jobs, text their exes, and feel like the things they want will destroy them." - Kelsey McKinney
"Reading Worry felt like finding a strange jawbone on the beach. Tanner's novel is animal, salty, and deeply pleasurable to worry in my hands. This is a dark and laugh-out-loud funny debut about sisterhood, internet poisoning, and suspecting that there is something incurably wrong with you but not wanting to know what it is (relatable!). Worry homes all the trappings of our times that have nowhere else to go: tradwife influencers, Jewish survivor guilt, the boy who threatened to kill you in seventh grade and is now organizing your high school reunion. Good luck reading this book without underlining every other sentence - it slapped me across the face and then held an ice pack to my cheek until the swelling went down." - Ruth Madievsky
"This book is like popping an Adderall and discovering the beauty of your food processor. Everything is so interesting! Everything is so funny! How long have I been crying? When I emerged, blinking, back into my own life, I hardly knew what was real; I never wanted to leave this vividly-imagined world. But what a relief to discover I hadn't ordered two hundred dollars' worth of candles on Amazon!" - Beth Morgan
"What a biting and brilliant novel. I couldn't put it down. Worry writes toward truth in the time of the internet, it uncovers the absolute horror of 'buying things,' and it does what novels are meant to do: hauntingly display the dark and familiar sides of human behavior. Worry is the best thing I've read in a very long time." - Kiley Reid
"Worry is an excellent, excellent comic novel, a proper laugh-until-you-cough onslaught of horrible manners, toxic relatives, internet vomit, and hilariously maimed pets. I've spent my whole life desperately trying not to say the stuff that comes out of these characters' mouths. A book that's impossible to read without annoying your friends with constant quotations. But who needs friends when you've got this book?" - Tony Tulathimutte
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