Help Wanted: A Barack Obama Reading Pick 2024

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'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

'Help Wanted held me from its first page. Waldman transmits, through narrative tension and beautifully rendered heartbreak, the exact way that capitalism turned on the very lives it was there to boost and instead corroded' Taffy Brodesser-Akner, author of The Long Island Compromise

'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.