The Assistant by Robert Walser
Penguin Modern Classics, £9.99

London and the South East by David Szaly
Cape, £12.99

Personal Days by Ed Park
Cape, £12.99

The wonderful world of work is all too often overlooked by novelists, so three new literary homages to the wage slave make fascinating, unusual reading.

Robert Walser's semi-autobiographical The Assistant is not strictly new, having been first published in 1907, but Susan Bernofsky's translation introduces English readers to this remarkable work of Swiss-German modernism. Walser was a troubled man who, after writing several gritty novels, spent decades in an asylum, writing nothing. “I'm not here to write, I'm here to be mad,” he told one visitor.

The Assistant tells of a year in the life of Marti, a frustrated office clerk who constantly battles with the desire to say insulting things to his boss, an irascible inventor in a small country town. Our hero's working day, which includes frequent stops for coffee and pastries in the garden and glorious lake-side rambles to the post office, may seem idyllic to today's deskbound reader, but his anxieties are universal. Will his boss be in a foul mood? When will he get paid? Eventually, after a year whose changing seasons are gloriously described, Marti quits, deciding that when you hate a job so much you start drinking at lunchtime, it's better the devil you don't know.

Lunchtime drinking is an important theme in David Szaly's wonderfully dark debut, London and the South East. The title refers to the catchment area seen on advertisements for the kind of media-sales job its principal character, Paul, does. We meet him when he's working as an ad salesman in a shouty, sweary, tense office in Holborn. By noon, the hellish daily commute from Hove and his ever more unreachable sales targets send him to the pub, where he sits with other pale-faced office refugees, talking up his sales figures and flirting with the barmaid.

But when a secret deal at work goes wrong, he finds himself unemployed and forced to put on the uniform of defeat - that of a supermarket shelf-stacker.

This book's bleak vision of the hollow men “lucky” enough to live in the South East and earn more than £30k gives a strikingly poetic glimpse into the soul of those faceless, big creatures into whose armpits one has so often been squashed on the Central Line.

Ed Park's Personal Days, forthcoming in May, is a less distinguished beast, but worth a mention for its insight into the intense office culture of thirtysomething New Yorkers. A handful of workers in an unnamed company, doing jobs that are ill-defined even to them, develop an intense closeness that has them e-mailing each other constantly and obsessing over the slightest change in the mood of their boss.

What begins as a quite stylish meditation on the restless, directionless nature of the post-baby boomer workforce surprisingly becomes a rather silly thriller when a fraudulent maniac takes over the company. Still, Parks's wry look at lives ruled by unreliable computers and bad coffee speaks volumes about the choices we make in the name of ambition.

The deskbound dreamer's longing to work outside, doing something physical, is common to all these novels - read each one and you might well decide never to enter a building that demands an ID card again. You might also understand a little better why, in the United States at least, moves are being made to enable people to live and work in more flexible and human environments. One day it will not only be novelists who get to stay home all day.

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