Help Wanted

A brilliant diagnosis and a moving account of retail workers hidden in plain sight all around us whose full humanity has simply never been so richly displayed or touchingly rendered -- Joshua Ferris, author of Then We Came to the End A classic of our age. Adelle Waldman turns the seemingly unremarkable matter of a retail job vacancy into a gripping study of conscience, morality and camaraderie. Help Wanted illuminates an entire universe that rarely features in literature revealing rich, nuanced, characters and the choices they face -- Catherine O'Flynn, author of What Was Lost Finally, the profoundly human big-box store truck-unloading novel you were waiting for. 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. The characters are so richly drawn-so full, under all their defences, of the desire to be loved-that even the annoying ones will win your heart. When the book came to an end, I felt bereft. Adelle Waldman is a master -- Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot I can't think of a book more necessary. Adelle Waldman takes us into the universe of American labour with generosity and compassion ... Simply enthralling -- Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story Help Wanted is a serious moral inquiry, through the medium of fiction, into the lives of a group of people who work in a big-box store in an American town that has seen better days. It's a book about work; about the retail industry in the age of Amazon; and about the effects of late capitalism on human relations. It is also hard to put down. This book should be assigned in business schools, but it won't be; the world it depicts is not the one dreamt of in their philosophy -- Keith Gessen, author of A Terrible Country What a gorgeous and ingenious and heartfelt work Help Wanted is! -- Michelle Orange, author of Pure Flame