Then We Came to an End

Nothing, not even TV series The Office, comes close to this book in describing modern office life. Set in Chicago in the big dot com advertising boon, the book follows the 'we' of the title (there is no me or I in this book, just us, you and me together) as they are laid off one by one as profits fail, clients jump ship and tempers strain.

The fishbowl mix of characters in the book is wonderfully vivid and achingly familiar, from Chris Yop, clinging to his ergonomic chair to Lynn Mason, the boss, whose breast cancer everyone pretends not to talk about to Carl Garbedian, secretly taking someone else's medication to Marcia Dwyer, whose hair is stuck in the eighties and Benny, who's just- well, just Benny. They imagine new career paths, play practical jokes on each other, are suspicious of and secretly in love with each other, from the boredom, redundancies, water cooler moments, meetings, flirtations and pure rage to the sad fact that life is passing them by, they exist in the office bubble, hardly ever leaving, never talking about anything else, and always looking out for themselves.

The book is warm, dangerously funny and painfully true. Then the review came to an end.