Then We Came to the End - Joshua Ferris

This debut novel received strong critical praise and appeared on several lists of the best books of 2007. It takes a comedic look at the lives of a group of office dwellers at a struggling advertising agency as they fight to avoid redundancy. Although highly readable it is rarely laugh out loud funny, and a lot of the workplace character observations have already been done in a number of situation comedies. On the page here, I felt the writing suffered from the absence of actors to bring these people and situations alive, and it made me appreciate how much more sterile a script of The Office or Friends might appear in mere draft form. Furthermore, the ...

Weird book that was on the Richard And Judy Booklist so I thought I'd give it a try when I saw it in the library. It was very Catch-22, skipped about and stories were left half told and then picked up later. The book is told through the collective "we," the office workers are a whole but talk about individuals within the whole. There is the boss who has breast cancer but hasn't told anyone, the man stealing someone else's depression meds and various other unique and odd people. Lay-offs result in a lot of nervousness, hilarity and fear for everyone but they still have a collective obsession with office gossip. I enjoyed it, but it took me quite a ...

This is Joshua Ferris's first book and was shortlisted for the National Book Awards and longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award 2007 so when I picked up this title I was immediately intrigued. Also, the cover (back and front), and for a couple of pages within, it is littered with praise from many newspapers/authors. Sometimes this can give a false impression - like when someone claims that it's the 'greatest thing ever written' and it turns out to be all hype - so when the Sunday Times declared it was 'the comedy debut of the year' I, as well as being intrigued, was also rather skeptical. I was wrong to worry. What follows is a tale of ...