Description

‘Help Wanted is like a great nineteenth-century novel about now, at once an effervescent workplace comedy and an exploration of the psychic toll exacted by the labour market’ Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot

‘Poignant, funny, stealthily ambitious’ The New York Times

‘Eliot-like … . It is simultaneously a joke, a homage, and a provocation for our unequal age. Help Wanted washes labour in a stately, almost Steinbeckian light, emphasizing its difficulty but also its dignity’ New Yorker

Tightly plotted, slyly caustic and often very funny’ Daily Mail

At a superstore in a small town in upstate New York, the members of Team Movement clock in every day at 3.55 am. Under the red-eyed scrutiny of their self-absorbed and barely competent boss, they empty delivery trucks of mountains of merchandise, stock the shelves and stagger home (or to another poorly paid day job) before the customers arrive.

When Big Will the store manager announces he’s leaving, everything changes. The eclectic team members now see a way to have their awful line manager promoted up and away from them, and to dream of a promotion of their own. Together they set an extravagant plan in motion.

Publisher Review

Waldman is a sharp observer of the world, a writer whose attention to particulars only sharpens the bigger picture * Atlantic * A brilliant diagnosis and a moving account of retail workers hidden in plain sight all around us whose full humanity has simply never been so richly displayed or touchingly rendered — Joshua Ferris, author of Then We Came to the End A classic of our age. Adelle Waldman turns the seemingly unremarkable matter of a retail job vacancy into a gripping study of conscience, morality and camaraderie. Help Wanted illuminates an entire universe that rarely features in literature revealing rich, nuanced, characters and the choices they face — Catherine O’Flynn, author of What Was Lost Finally, the profoundly human big-box store truck-unloading novel you were waiting for. Help Wanted is like a great nineteenth-century novel about now, at once an effervescent workplace comedy and an exploration of the psychic toll exacted by the labour market. The characters are so richly drawn-so full, under all their defences, of the desire to be loved-that even the annoying ones will win your heart. When the book came to an end, I felt bereft. Adelle Waldman is a master — Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot I can’t think of a book more necessary. Adelle Waldman takes us into the universe of American labour with generosity and compassion … Simply enthralling — Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story Help Wanted is a serious moral inquiry, through the medium of fiction, into the lives of a group of people who work in a big-box store in an American town that has seen better days. It’s a book about work; about the retail industry in the age of Amazon; and about the effects of late capitalism on human relations. It is also hard to put down. This book should be assigned in business schools, but it won’t be; the world it depicts is not the one dreamt of in their philosophy — Keith Gessen, author of A Terrible Country What a gorgeous and ingenious and heartfelt work Help Wanted is! — Michelle Orange, author of Pure Flame Help Wanted isn’t just smart and funny and wise. It’s also vital to our understanding of how and why the American dream is becoming increasingly inaccessible to working-class Americans — Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls