Description

SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2025

Plans for the expansion of the Capmeadow Business Park are in full swing – its mission is to become the greatest business park in the region. Tom Crowley, a mid-level employee, loses his daughter at ‘bring your daughter to work day’. He raises the alarm, and his colleagues rush to help him find her. Eventually, after no sign of her is found, it transpires she was never there. And yet, as time goes on, Tom still cannot reconcile that she is really at home. Refusing to accept that she is safe, Tom continues to search for her in the maze of corridors and impossible multi-dimensional spaces that make up his place of work…

Because Capmeadow is expanding in unexpected ways, a Liaison Officer becomes the central focus for complaints about how the expansion is impacting the lives of the employees – unexpected buildings, years-long business days, cursed farmers’ markets, and corridors of the mind are draining the life from Tom and everyone he works with.

Years pass, and Tom remains at the company, convinced he is in the presence of his now adult daughter. But has he judged it correctly? And can anything go back to the way it was??

Publisher Review

Ben Pester renders the baffling peculiarity of employment with a subversive imagination that should get him fired. The Expansion Project is a weird, unsettling, moving book about how we are lost from each other – and ourselves – in a labyrinth we made, and which now makes us — Keith Ridgway Terrific. An offbeat and deft exploration of memory, grief and parental love. Ben Pester continues to impress me with his talents — Irenosen Okojie It’s one thing to write a subversive novel; another thing altogether to write a subversive novel that gives narrative ballast to its batshit. Here is a novel that does. A surrealist nightmare that flows with its own logic, humour, politics and plot energy — Ross Raisin I can think of few other writers who can seamlessly blend the hyper-real and the humane, or make the allegorical hit home with this emotional depth. Pester is a genius of capturing the vicissitudes of contemporary life… The Expansion Project imbues the absurd with soul… Mordantly funny but never cynical… At times frightening, at times genuinely moving in a way I wish I knew how to do. This is an eagerly awaited debut novel… and it delivers on every expectation. Ultimately revitalising, and heralds what I hope might be a new direction in UK fiction — Luke Kennard A profoundly moving, extraordinary novel that deftly combines the numinous and otherworldly with the prosaic and quotidian to the most powerful emotional effect. Witty, touching, layered and entirely original — Rose Ruane Ben Pester is my favourite cartographer for that zone in the soul where panic shades into true metaphysical horror… He makes it look so easy: such is the agility of his first-person voices and the ductility of his sentences, with their deceptive transparency, their sudden syntactical jinks, their impossible-to-predict flickers towards the lyrical… His emotional range is too deep for us to feel manipulated. We panic with his characters. They say our panic in their words… A clean, stinging joy, a disquieted ache, a clean reminder of how hard it is to have to be here, and how much harder again to have to leave — Tim MacGabhann A slippery jewel of a novel that refracts received notions on work and family to ask: at what point do we realise we have stepped out of the life we thought we had? It casts light on the fog of corporate language which makes the world unrecognisable, and which wraps itself around our frailties until we also cannot recognise ourselves. This is a luminous and startling novel from a unique new voice — Samuel Fisher A fever-dream of a book… This surreal trip into a Severance-esque corporate world is deeply unsettling, compelling and very entertaining. I loved it — Jo Leevers I was mesmerised by this inventive, stifled scream of a novel about work, time, space and relationships under late capitalism, full of the eerie strangeness of Severance, by way of Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, Graeme Macrae Burnet’s Case Study and Olga Ravn’s The Employees… This is an essential read — (Book of the Month) * The Bookseller *