Help Wanted
By Adelle Waldman

Aand NEW YORK TIMESand Book Review Editors' ChoiceAand VOGUE,and VULTURE,and ELLE,and NEW YORKERand andand ECONOMISTand Best Book of the YearAand TIMEand Must-Read Book of 2024'Filled with an exceptional cast of characters and written with a delicious acid-drop humour'and i Paper, Best Paperbacks Out in 2025'Help Wantedand 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 ofand The Idiot'Help Wantedand 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 ofand The Long Island Compromise'Poignant, funny, stealthily ambitious'and The New York Times'Eliot-like ... . It is simultaneously a joke, a homage, and a provocation for our unequal age.and Help Wantedand washes labour in a stately, almost Steinbeckian light, emphasizing its difficulty but also its dignity'and New YorkerTightly plotted, slyly caustic and often very funny'and Daily MailWhen the store manager at an upstate New York superstore announces he's leaving, the motley crew members of Team Movement take the news surprisingly well. Overworked and exhausted, they spend their early morning shifts scheming about their jobs and their futures. Now is their only chance to get their hated line manager Meredith promoted up and away from them. And then one of them can replace her - but who will it be?