SEATTLE — Maria Semple made an instant, jarring discovery when she moved with her boyfriend and daughter from Los Angeles to Seattle, a city whose Patagonia-clad inhabitants like to talk about bicycling, the environment and the eternally dull question (in her opinion) of whether it might rain.

“It’s just not a funny place,” said Ms. Semple, a novelist and veteran comedy writer who worked on the television shows “Arrested Development” and “Mad About You.” “I was in a miserable mind frame, and I found that I was driving around and all I was thinking about were funny things about how awful Seattle was. I would do these riffs in my head and I would polish them in my head. It was poisonous and self-pitying.”

But from those silently brooding riffs came an idea for her next heroine: Bernadette Fox, a difficult, creatively frustrated misanthrope who, like Ms. Semple, had relocated to Seattle from Los Angeles and loathed her new city.

“Where’d You Go, Bernadette,” published this week by Little, Brown & Company, has emerged as one of the most absorbing novels of the summer. It tells the story of Bernadette, a former architect who won a MacArthur “genius” grant and then disappeared from public view; her tech-guru husband, Elgin Branch, who is nerd-famous for an especially rousing TED talk; and their precocious teenage daughter, Bee, who has convinced her parents to go on a family trip to Antarctica before she heads off to boarding school.