I love a good workplace novel, and I’m happy to report that I found a great one recently: E, by Matt Beaumont. It follows in the proud tradition of epistolary novels - but instead of letters, this one’s entirely in email. More specifically, the novel tells the story of a crazy, eclectic, and sometimes coked-up London ad agency trying to win their biggest client ever. I was worried that the email concept would be a gimmick, but it totally worked because Beaumont does a great job using minimal language to effectively capture different personalities for all the characters in the office. Almost all the office cliches are there - the frenemies, the executive who goes through assistants like Kleenex, the coworker hookup, the assistant who is so blindly loyal to her boss you wonder if she’s in love with him, and the like. Plus, I really love British slang. Anyway, the book is absolutely worth a read - I was reading it on the plane, and was actually disappointed when the plane landed. If that’s not an endorsement, I don’t know what is.
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