Help Wanted

'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

'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

At a superstore in a small town in upstate New York, the members of Team Movement clock in every day at 3.55 am. Under the red-eyed scrutiny of their self-absorbed and barely competent boss, they empty delivery trucks of mountains of merchandise, stock the shelves and stagger home (or to another poorly paid day job) before the customers arrive.

When Big Will the store manager announces he's leaving, everything changes. The eclectic team members now see a way to have their awful line manager promoted up and away from them, and to dream of a promotion of their own. Together they set an extravagant plan in motion.




Genre: Literary Fiction

"Help Wanted is like a great nineteenth-century novel about now, at once an effervescent workplace comedy and a profoundly human exploration of the psychic toll exacted by the labor market. The characters are so richly drawn-so full, under all their defenses, of the desire to be loved-that even the annoying ones will win your heart. Adelle Waldman is a master." - Elif Batuman

"Help Wanted is a marvelous novel. We get to eavesdrop and follow and enjoy the misadventures of the motley cast working the four in the morning shift (unloading trucks at a big box store, a place none of these workers can afford). On one level this is about economics and gentrification; on another level it is about people struggling to keep themselves from drowning; meanwhile there are hijinks so funny you blow your tea out of your nose; there's a perfectly absurd plot straight out of Catch-22. We want everyone to get that lifesaving promotion. The worst thing about this novel is that I finished it and can't ever read it again for the first time. But now it is part of my life. I am thankful to Adelle Waldman for being brave and talented and bighearted enough to have created this gift." - Charles Bock

"In Help Wanted, the tragic heroes of the gig economy, full of dreams and sob stories and what-if scenarios, concoct a plot to better their lives. Yet even as frustrations mount and their plot goes sideways, hope never dies. Adelle Waldman delivers both a brilliant diagnosis and a moving account of retail workers hidden in plain sight all around us, whose full humanity has never been so richly displayed or touchingly rendered." - Joshua Ferris

"A serious moral inquiry into the lives of a group of people who work in a big-box store, Help Wanted is a novel 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." - Keith Gessen

"Help Wanted isn't just smart and funny and wise. It's also important-vital, really-to our understanding of how and why the American dream is becoming increasingly inaccessible to working class Americans, even as that long-shot dream stubbornly refuses to die." - Richard Russo

"I can't think of a book more necessary. Adelle Waldman takes us into the universe of American labor with generosity and compassion. It has been a while since workers have been portrayed through the lens of a novelist with such insight and attention to the details of service industry life. Simply enthralling." - Gary Shteyngart