Clock in for a night shift - and for a moving multi-perspective novel that explores life in the gig economy

A NEW YORK TIMES Book Review Editors' Choice A VOGUE, VULTURE, ELLE, NEW YORKER and ECONOMIST Best Book of the Year A TIME Must-Read Book of 2024 '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 When 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?

"A superb, empathic comedy of manners. Perhaps the most impressive thing about Help Wanted is that Waldman manages, in telling her small story, to describe not just the American economic prison but the global one. So: both a novel of manners and a systems novel, a book that shows us, perhaps, how intimately linked these apparently disparate genres were all along" - Guardian

"Waldman applies her sharp sense for relational drama and dark comedy to the retail sector... The book shines" - The New York Times

"Tightly plotted, slyly caustic and often very funny, it's hugely enjoyable" - Daily Mail

"Waldman is a sharp observer of the world, a writer whose attention to particulars only sharpens the bigger picture" - Atlantic

"Scathing, often humorous and sharply observed ... Waldman's writing is richest and most humane as she traces each worker's private ambitions" - Telegraph

"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

"At once familiar yet revelatory in its specificity ... Waldman crafts her characters' endearing and off-putting qualities with absolutely zero condescension. Reading it, we root for everyone" - New York Magazine

"Could not be more fascinating or more fun" - People Magazine

"Poignant, funny, stealthily ambitious" - The New York Times

"A smart satire of skulduggery and drudgery" - Times

"Funny, empathetic and gloriously real" - Daily Express

"Shows Waldman's gift for subtle, devastating satire ... corporate hypocrisy and the futility of hard graft are skewered in this novel on working culture in a New York superstore" - Financial Times

"An astute social commentary on the gruelling lives of low-wage workers" - Irish Times

"Funny, gloriously real and empathetic, and a moving reminder that everyone is the main character of their own life" - Sunday Express

"Waldman writes with remarkable empathy while also mining the dark humour in the foibles of any workplace" - Mail on Sunday

"A funny, poignant work of fiction ... I recommend it, too, for its insights into leadership, motivation and the hidden world of work" - Financial Times