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Worry

A Novel

Read by Helen Laser
LIST PRICE $19.99

About The Book

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

A "dryly witty" (New Yorker) and "fabulously revealing" (The New 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.

About The Author

Photograph © Sasha Fletcher

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 stories, essays, and reviews appear or are forthcoming in GrantaLos Angeles Review of BooksThe Baffler, The New York Times Book Review, and Jewish Currents, among other outlets. Worry is her first novel.

About The Reader

Why We Love It

“Alexandra Tanner has all ten fingers on the pulse of the zeitgeist. This book captures our cultural moment in a way that has me looking over my shoulder and wondering if art imitates life, or if life imitates Worry. The realest part of this novel, though, is the relationship between two siblings, and from the opening scenes, I saw the complex, messy, and often hilarious experience of sisterhood reflected back at me. If you have a sister, this book is for you, and if you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to have a sister, this is quite a revealing portrait.”

—Emily P., Assistant Editor, on Worry

Product Details

  • Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio (March 26, 2024)
  • Runtime: 7 hours and 13 minutes
  • ISBN13: 9781797170442

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