Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris

A HILARIOUS SATIRE THAT SHOWS OFFICE DYNAMICS AT THEIR MOST PETTY AND PROFOUND FROM THE BOOKER PRIZE-SHORTLISTED AUTHOR, JOSHUA FERRIS

They spend their days – and too many of their nights – at work. Away from friends and family, they share a stretch of stained carpet with a group of strangers they call colleagues.

There’s Chris, clinging to his ergonomic chair; Lynn, the boss, whose breast cancer everyone pretends not to talk about; Carl, secretly taking someone else’s medication; Marcia, whose hair is stuck in the eighties; and Benny, who’s just – well, just Benny. Amidst the boredom, redundancies, water cooler moments, meetings, flirtations and pure rage, life is happening, to their great surprise, all around them.

Then We Came to the End is about sitting all morning next to someone you cross the road to avoid at lunch. It’s the story of your life and mine.

‘Very funny, intense and exhilarating . . . For the first time in fiction, it has truly captured the way we work’ The Times

‘As dazzling as Franzen’s The Corrections and as confident as Tartt’s The Secret History . . . Exceptional, very funny’ Daily Telegraph

‘Slick, sophisticated and very funny, Ferris’s cracking debut has modern Everyman fighting for his identity in an increasingly impersonal world’ Daily Mail