Then We Came to the End
Mar 2008 · Penguin UK
4.0star
2 reviewsreport
Ebook
400
Pages
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About this ebook
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.
*Joshua Ferris' mind-blowing new book, A Calling for Charlie Barnes, is available to pre-order now.*
'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
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.
*Joshua Ferris' mind-blowing new book, A Calling for Charlie Barnes, is available to pre-order now.*
'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
Ratings and reviews
4.0
2 reviews
Andy Heard
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April 8, 2014
The tale of a group of fractious co-workers at an a advertising agency that suffers hard times and has to let workers go. I learned new euphemisms for redundancy. It's good enough a book that I was curious about the lifeworks and back tales off our protagonists and was keen to the reach the end, so to speak. Unusual is that much of the story is told in the first person plural, a situation resolved in the final sentence. Recommended.
About the author
Joshua Ferris was born in Illinois in 1974. He is the author of Then We Came to the End (2007), which was nominated for the National Book Award and longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, and the highly acclaimed The Unnamed. In 2010 he was selected for the New Yorker's prestigious '20 under 40' list. In 2014 To Rise Again at a Decent Hour won the Dylan Thomas Prize and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He lives in upstate New York.
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