Then We Came to the End [Hardcover]

Outstanding, hugely satisfying, exceptionally well-executed . . . An incisive, urgent, funny and snappily written novel (Sunday Times Magazine )

As impressively confident as Donna Tartt's The Secret History and as technically dazzling as Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections . . . Exceptional, funny, radical (Telegraph )

Brilliant, funny, stomach-turningly accurate (Observer ) --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

'Savagely funny yet kind-hearted tale of office life . . . You
won't find a sharper portrait'

'Wildly funny debut . . . At once delightfully freakish and
entirely credible'

'A brilliant account of the desperations of working life and it
had the singular distinction of making me laugh aloud'

'Expansive, great-hearted and acidly funny . . . Perceptive and
darkly entertaining'

`What looks at first glance like a sweet-tempered satire of
workplace culture . . . may even be a great American novel'

'Brilliant, funny, stomach-turningly accurate . . . an
attention-grabbing display of virtuosity . . . Descriptions of the ordinary
are so good they need no elaboration'

`[A] formidable first novel which the whole of America is talking
about'

`Darkly funny and often tragic - a Catch-22 of the cubicles - [it]
unravels the chaotic reality behind the unified corporate identity'

`Slick, sophisticated and very funny, Ferris's cracking debut has
modern Everyman fighting for his identity in an increasingly impersonal
world'

'How we hated our coffee mugs! And our mouse pads, our desk clocks, our daily calendars, all the contents of our desk drawers. Even the photos of our loved ones taped to our computer monitors for uplift and support turned to cloying reminders of time served ...' Welcome to the world of Joshua Ferris' dazzlingly acute, brilliantly original, agonizingly funny novel. The dotcom bubble has just burst on an advertising agency on Chicago's Magnificent Mile. Employees shuffle slowly up the steps towards the revolving doors, afraid of what is waiting to greet them inside their cubicles ..."Then We Came to the End" is about how we spend our days and too many of our nights. It is about being away from friends and family, about sharing a stretch of stained carpet with a group of strangers we call colleagues. It is about sitting all morning next to someone you deliberately cross the road to avoid at lunchtime. Joshua Ferris' fabulous novel is the story of your life, and mine. It is the story of our times.

Joshua Ferris was born in Illinois in 1974. He attended the University of Iowa and the University of California, Irvine. He now lives in Brooklyn, New York.