Shared book picks

6 book picks worth a look

Someone shared these with you from Highstreett’s book search. Every title is checked against an ISBN record. The links below help you find an edition from the retailer available for this search’s country.

Then We Came to the End

Joshua Ferris · 2006

Its collective first-person plural voice and deadpan office comedy turn corporate routine into a shared identity that stands in for individual selves.

The Remains of the Day

Kazuo Ishiguro · 1989

A butler's flat, self-deceiving narration shows how a professional role can hollow out and replace the person inside it, which is exactly the axis of a workplace script becoming a substitute self.

The New Me

Halle Butler · 2019

A flat, caustic narrator drifts through temp work and self-help platitudes, using routine as a shield against the feeling that her life is going nowhere.

Severance

Ling Ma · 2018

A deadpan office novel about routine as a shield against collapse, where the heroine's commitment to corporate normalcy is both funny and quietly horrifying.

The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century

Olga Ravn

Spare, affectless statements from workers on a spaceship make bureaucratic routine the only remaining script for personhood, matching the reader's taste for detached, unsettling work fiction.

Temporary

Hilary Leichter · 2020

A picaresque of temp work with a numb, affectless narrator who keeps trying on roles, directly dramatizing the cost of passing as a normal, employable person.

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Ownership, checked

Waterstones, Foyles, Blackwell’s and Hatchards read like four different bookshops. On the register they are one: all four trace to the same controller, walked company by company through Companies House.

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