Books for when you want to quit your 9 to 5
Stop fantasising about sending your boss that too-honest resignation letter, and try reading one of these books instead. Whether you're looking for joyful escapism or just want to put your own daily grind in perspective, reading a good book will be less work and stress than writing a new job application.
Workplace dramas, so your job doesn't seem so bad
The Opposite of Success by Eleanor Elliott Thomas
All Lorrie wants is to get promoted, accept her body and end global warming. By Friday. Is that really too much to ask?
Council employee Lorrie Hope has a great partner, two adorable kids and absolutely no idea what to do with her life. This Friday, she's hoping for change – it's launch day for her big work project, and she's applied for a promotion she's not entirely sure she wants. As the day spirals from bad to worse to frankly unhinged, Lorrie must reconsider what she can expect from life, love and middle management.
Hard Copy by Fien Veldman, translated by Hester Velmans
A customer service assistant spends her long workdays printing letters. Her one friend is the printer and, in the dark confines of her office, she begins to open up to him, talking about her fears, her past, her hopes and dreams.
To her, it seems like a beautiful friendship is blossoming. To her boss, it seems like she's losing her mind.
Diagnosed with burnout and placed on leave, she faces severance and worse, separation from her beloved printer. But she's not about to give up on her only friend without a fight . . .
The Consultant by Im Seong-sun, translated by An Seon Jae
The Consultant is very good at his job. He creates simple, elegant, effective solutions for . . . restructuring. Nothing obvious or messy. Certainly nothing anyone would ever suspect as murder.
The 'natural deaths' he plans have always gone well – a medicine replaced here, a mechanism jammed there. His performance reviews are excellent. And it's not as though he knows these people.
Until his next 'customer' turns out to be someone he not only knows but cares about, and for the first time, he begins to question the role he plays in the vast, anonymous Company. And as he slowly begins to understand the real scope of their work, he realises just how easy it would be for the Company to arrange one more perfect murder . . .
I Hope This Finds You Well by Natalie Sue
Would you want to know what your colleagues say behind your back? Jolene certainly doesn’t. She’s riddled with anxiety, depressed, and hates her coworkers. The less she knows about them, the better.
So when a catastrophic IT fuck up grants her access to all of their emails and private messages, she’s initially horrified. The last thing she wants is to be privy to their sad discussions about dying desk plants and marital troubles.
That’s until with job cuts looming, she realises the power this new-found knowledge gives her . . .
The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada, translated by David Boyd
Within the sprawling industrial complex of the factory, three new employees are each assigned a department. There, each must focuses on a specific task: one shreds paper, one proofreads documents, and another studies the moss growing all over the expansive grounds. As they grow accustomed to the routine and co-workers, their lives become governed by their work – days take on a strange logic and momentum, and little by little, the margins of reality seem to be dissolving: Where does the factory end and the rest of the world begin? What's going on with the strange animals here? And after a while – it could be weeks or years – the three workers struggle to answer the most basic question: What am I doing here?
Books to provide a reality check about get-rich-quick schemes
Confidence by Rafael Frumkin
At seventeen, Ezra Green doesn’t have a lot going on for him: he’s shorter than average, snaggle-toothed, internet-addicted, and halfway to being legally blind. But his seemingly mediocre life changes course when he meets Orson, a brilliant and Adonis with a mind for hustling. Together, the two embark upon what promises to be a fruitful career of scam artistry.
But things start to spin wildly out of control when they try to pull off their biggest scam yet – Nulife, a corporation that promises its consumers a lifetime of bliss.
Margo's Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe
Margo Millet's got money troubles. As the child of a Hooter's waitress and an ex-Pro-Wrestler, she's always known she'd have to make it on her own. When she finds herself pregnant by her college professor – who is very keen not to be involved – she needs cash, fast.
At twenty, alone with a baby, what Margo lacks in options she makes up for in ingenuity, and soon she has a plan: she'll start an OnlyFans as an experiment, producing content and writing storylines unlike anything else out there. Help arrives in the form of her live-action role-playing flatmate Suzie, and her father, Jinx – a veteran of the wrestling world, who has experience of making an audience fall in love.
Soon, Margo is an online phenomenon. Could this be the answer to all of her problems, or does internet fame come with too high a price?
Fruit of the Dead by Rachel Lyon
Camp counsellor Cory Ansel, eighteen and aimless, is afraid to face her high-strung single mother in New York, when the father of one of her campers offers an alternative – a high paying job on his private island off the coast of Maine.
The CEO of a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company, Rolo Picazo is middle-aged, divorced, magnetic. He is also intoxicated by Cory. When Rolo proffers a childcare job alongside an NDA, Cory quiets an internal warning and accepts what seems almost too good to be true. Plied with luxury and opiates manufactured by his company, she continues to tell herself she’s in charge. Her mother, Emer, senses otherwise . . .
Come and Get It by Kiley Reid
It's 2017 at the University of Arkansas. Millie Cousins, a senior resident assistant, wants to graduate, get a job and buy a house. So when Agatha Paul, a visiting professor and writer, offers Millie an easy yet unusual opportunity, she jumps at the chance. But Millie's starry-eyed hustle becomes jeopardised by odd new friends, vengeful dorm pranks and illicit intrigue.
Come and Get It is a tension-filled story about money, indiscretion and bad behavior
Escapist reads, for when you're out of vacation days
The Gentleman from Peru by Andre Aciman
A group of college friends find themselves marooned at a luxurious hotel on the Amalfi Coast in Italy. While their boat is being repaired, they can't help but observe the daily routine of a fellow hotel guest - a mysterious, white-bearded stranger who sits on the veranda each night and smokes one cigarette, sometimes two. When the group decides to invite the elegant traveller to lunch with them, they cannot begin to imagine the miraculous abilities, strange wisdom, and a life-changing story he is about to impart to one of the friends in particular. . .
Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi, translated by Geoffrey Trousselot
In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time.
In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the café’s time-travelling offer. But the journey into the past does not come without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the café, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold . . .
Love & Rome by Jenna Lo Bianco
Moving from Melbourne to Rome was meant to fix Stella Chiaro's life – and it did, for a while. But Stella is running out of time and money; she's desperate to find stable work in the art world to keep afloat, or she will have to leave her beloved Eternal City behind.
The last thing she needs right now is distractions . . . but with the arrival of a handsome new flatmate and the sweet owner of the new local bar, the promise of a new job and new love suddenly beckon. In a journey stretching across the ancient cobblestones of Rome to enchanting Florence, Stella must work out if there's really a life for her here, or if it's arrivederci to 'Rome Sweet Home'.
Death in the Air by Ram Murali
Welcome to Samsara, a world-class spa nestled in the Indian Himalayas where all your wishes are only a gilded notecard away. Ro Krishna has just checked in. With his rakish charm, Oxford education, and perfect hair, he had it all – well, until he left his job under mysterious circumstances. At Samsara, he's free to explore the innumerable yoga classes, wellness treatments and guided meditation sessions on offer alongside the rest of the exclusive hotel's guests.
Until one of the guests – gorgeous, charismatic, well-connected, like most of them – is found dead . . .
Audrey's Gone AWOL by Annie de Monchaux
Audrey Lamont has happily devoted herself to family life for the best part of 40 years, but lately she’s become aware that she lost herself somewhere between 'I do' and the weekly shop.
Worse, her academic husband Simon has found time for romance – just not with Audrey. Feeling invisible to everyone, even herself, she flees to her aunt’s home in rural France. While waiting for her sudden absence to spark a change of heart in Simon, Audrey finds solace in the charms of the French countryside and the company of her aged aunt and a cast of eccentric Bretons.
