Listen to Joshua Ferris reading from his book at the London Word Festival 2008

Set in a Chicago advertising agency, Ferris’s hugely enjoyable first novel delineates both the absurdities of office life, and the frustration, anger and despair simmering under the surface of his characters’ daily routines. Most of the workers appear to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and when the agency starts to struggle to attract clients and a series of layoffs begins, some of the staff are tipped over the edge. Ferris plays safe to start with: his description of the mundane activities of the working week (the meetings, the e-mails, the lunches) will be familiar (perhaps overly so) to anyone who has worked in an office. Yet his narrative soon veers off into a mix of the comic, the tragic and the surreal — a tricky combination that he pulls off superbly. Thus one character’s struggle with breast cancer sits side by side with another’s decision to spend a working day communicating only in quotations from the first two Godfather films. One character suffers divorce, another loses a child, while another inherits a totem pole. The book is only incidentally about advertising, although that industry does supply some of the book’s best jokes: when a relative of one of the staff discovers that copywriters and art directors call themselves “creatives”, he exclaims, “That’s the stupidest use of an English word I ever encountered.” Ferris has created a microcosm of modern capitalist society, and while much of his style and subject matter is a little too reminiscent of Douglas Coupland, this is an extremely impressive debut.

THEN WE CAME TO THE END by Joshua Ferris

(Penguin £7.99)

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