An unnerving, haunted satire of the late-capitalist workplace in which nothing is quite what it seems.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE NERO PRIZE FOR DEBUT FICTION SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE Plans for the expansion of the Capmeadow Business Park are in full swing - its mission is to become the greatest business park in the region. Tom Crowley, a mid-level employee, loses his daughter at 'bring your daughter to work day'. He raises the alarm, and his colleagues rush to help him find her. Eventually, after no sign of her is found, it transpires she was never there. And yet, as time goes on, Tom still cannot reconcile that she is really at home. Refusing to accept that she is safe, Tom continues to search for her in the maze of corridors and impossible multi-dimensional spaces that make up his place of work... Because Capmeadow is expanding in unexpected ways, a Liaison Officer becomes the central focus for complaints about how the expansion is impacting the lives of the employees - unexpected buildings, years-long business days, cursed farmers' markets, and corridors of the mind are draining the life from Tom and everyone he works with. Years pass, and Tom remains at the company, convinced he is in the presence of his now adult daughter. But has he judged it correctly? And can anything go back to the way it was??

"This debut by a young British talent, both office satire and weird thriller, is that rare thing: unique' Telegraph 'Greatest Books of 2025'" - Telegraph

"Excellent" - New Statesman

"A tour de force in surrealist comedy... Fresh, sublime and eerie. He could be described, in part, as a comic descendant of J.G. Ballard... Pester is a talented writer of the surreal... A novel about dis­location that feels dislocating. It should serve as an ominous warning to us all" - Sunday Telegraph

"Surreal and unsettling... Pester's deceptively lucid prose mocks office platitudes but also gets to the crux of the loneliness and alienation bred by corporate language and spaces... With a steely commitment to its outlandish form and plot, Pester's novel is as nebulous, mind-bending and delightfully strange as the workplace it describes" - Observer

"This ambitious debut skewers the absurdities of office life and bureaucracy with sharp, surreal wit... Crackles with invention... Pester has an ear for deadpan absurdity... Exhilaratingly weird" - Daily Mail

"[Pester] has succeeded in creating an extreme "drowning out" of the normal sounds of human life and activity. I appreciated Pester's well-executed vision of a genuinely soul-sucking workplace... Magical, folk horror-informed and time-twisting. A world lurking unseen alongside everyday linear British life" - Financial Times

"It's within the mundane that Pester lodges (or dislodges) the strangest things... Pester's satirical and surreal scrutiny pushes the concept of the 'work-life balance' to its limit... Pester's fiction is its own beast. You have to wonder where he gets his ideas... This is not a cheerful book, but it is a funny one" - Times Literary Supplement

"A debut novel with echoes of Kafka, Flaubert and the office sitcom... Both poignant and disconcerting... Beautifully observed... A fever dream of a novel - disconcerting, strange and unexpectedly touching" - Spectator

"[An] absorbing blend of mystery, confusion and corporate over-reach... Pester's prose captures the dreamy, emotional dysfunction of the workplace" - New Statesman

"If you think you are about to read a realist novel about everyday life and work in 21st century England, you have another thing coming... A radically untethered fictional world... Splendidly inventive... A wonderfully strange and haunting book" - Literary Review

"'An office novel of a very different kind... A horror story about screen society, in which sensations are constant and images refuse to separate into the real and imagined" - Guardian

"I was mesmerised by this inventive, stifled scream of a novel about work, time, space and relationships under late capitalism, full of the eerie strangeness of Severance, by way of Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, Graeme Macrae Burnet's Case Study and Olga Ravn's The Employees... This is an essential read" - The Bookseller

"Labelled part of a wave of 'Severance lit' by the Sunday Times, Ben Pester's book is a melancholy slice of sci-fi, with shades of Kazuo Ishiguro, glimmers of Philip K. Dick's Ubik... Pester carefully captures something specific of the alienation and disintegration that comes from ever-expanding "work", all while making his central family story touching without veering into sentimental" - Shortlist