Martin Lukes: Who Moved My BlackBerry - Lucy Kellaway

After thoroughly enjoying Matt Beaumont’s “E – A Novel”, a novel composed entirely of E-Mails following a few months in the offices of a major advertising agency, it was a given that I would fancy reading “Who Moved My Blackberry™”, which was in a similar vein. Rather than following the whole company this time around, however, we are mostly just reading the ramblings of one man – A&B’s Marketing Director, Martin Lukes. There is the occasional text message where applicable as well and clearly some of his E-Mails were sent whilst on the move (the standard “send from my Blackberry™ Wireless Handheld” is a bit of a giveaway there) but it seems that Martin ...  Read the complete review

The format of Lucy Kellaway’s ‘Who Moved My Blackberry’ is, in a way, very traditional. The first epistolary novel — that is, novel written in the form of letters sent & received by characters — was Tobias Smollett’s ‘The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker’, published in 1771. But who writes letters nowadays? We send emails instead. Like Matt Beaumont’s successful & amusing ‘e’ (2000), ‘Who Moved my Blackberry?’ consists entirely of emails. Nearly all of the emails are written by marketing director Martin Lukes (& not always sent to their intended recipients), but a few jokes depend on us being shown emails he has received as well — a slight ...  Read the complete review

I seem to quite regularly fall foul of the book shelves in Tesco and Sainsbury during a perfectly normal shopping trip. I’ve found that around 95% of the time I find books and subsequently authors I really like in these situations. It was during one of these normal, everyday trips that I came across Who Moved My Blackberry™? The yellow cover drew me to it and the testimonies splattered all over the cover made me curious and so for the princely sum of £3.93 I decided to take a gamble on it. It focuses on a year in the life of A&B’s Marketing director, Martin Lukes who is also the books co author. In fact Lukes himself is a creation of Financial Times ...  Read the complete review