Then We Came to the End - Joshua Ferris

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 ...  Read the complete review

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 ...  Read the complete review

How do you write a book about a group of people getting bored doing something numbingly boring without making the novel itself equally tedious? This is the question Joshua Ferris for the most part overcomes in Then We Came To The End, a witty, perceptive tale of the struggles and successes of those working for a Chicago-based advertising agency. Billing itself as being about "sitting all morning next to someone you cross the road to avoid at lunch", Ferris' novel opens at the end of the dot-com boom of the late-nineties, with the employees of the unnamed agency confident of their unassailable positions and blasé about their comfortable salaries. Then ...  Read the complete review

I loved the title of this book, and having just come to the end of my own job, I thought it was a must-read over Christmas. The plot follows a group of advertisers, working in Chicago during the 'dot com' boom and subsequent bust. The book is written about a particular kind of office, one that's simultaneously creative and commercial. The people there try hard to reconcile the act of creating, which is perhaps inherently meaningful, with the crushing boredom of selling everyday products. Strikingly, the narrator writes directly from the perspective of the group, so everything starts with a 'we'. I thought this was one of the coolest aspects of the ...  Read the complete review

Then We Came to the End follows the jobs of a group of very different people who all work in an advertising agency at a time of redundancies and lay-offs. While each character avidly tries to keep their job, the usual office happenings are going on including office affairs, boredom, depression and, of course, gossip and rumours. It tells the story of how life is when working in an office where you spend the majority of your life. Although not his usual genre of book, my husband read it and thoroughly enjoyed it. I found him laughing out loud in a few places and I thought it must be good. So, working in an office myself, I thought this book would suit me ...  Read the complete review