It<U+2019>s the fall of 2016. Cate, a set designer in her early forties, lives and works in Chicago<U+2019>s theater community. She has stayed too long at the fair and knows it<U+2019>s time to get past her prolonged adolescence and stop taking handouts from her parents. She has a firm plan to get solvent and settled in a serious relationship. She has tentatively started something new even as she<U+2019>s haunted by an old, going-nowhere affair. Her ex-husband, recently booted from his most recent marriage, is currently camped out in Cate<U+2019>s spare bedroom, in thrall to online conspiracy theories, and she<U+2019>s not sure how to help him. Her best friend Neale, a yoga instructor, lives nearby with her son and is Cate<U+2019>s model for what serious adulthood looks like. Only a few blocks away, but in a parallel universe we find Nathan and Irene<U+2014>casual sociopaths, drug addicts, and small-time criminals. Their world and Cate<U+2019>s intersect the day she comes into Neale<U+2019>s kitchen to find these strangers assaulting her friend. Forced to take fast, spontaneous action, Cate does something she<U+2019>s never even considered. She now also knows the violence she is capable of, as does everyone else in her life, and overnight, their world has changed. Anshaw<U+2019>s flawed, sympathetic, and uncannily familiar characters grapple with their altered relationships and identities against the backdrop of the new Trump presidency and a country waking to a different understanding of itself. Eloquent, moving, and beautifully observed, Right after the Weather is the work of a master of exquisite prose and a wry and compassionate student of the human condition writing at the height of her considerable powers.