Jacket Image



The Beautiful Bureaucrat: A Novel

Helen Phillips

List price £16.99
Product Details
Format:
Hardback
ISBN:
9781627793766
Published:
01 Oct 2015
Publisher:
Macmillan
Dimensions:
192 pages - 210 x 139 x 7mm

Categories:

In a windowless building in a remote part of town, the newly employed Josephine inputs an endless string of numbers into something known only as The Database. After a long period of joblessness, she's not inclined to question her fortune, but as the days inch by and the files stack up, Josephine feels increasingly anxious in her surroundings-the office's scarred pinkish walls take on a living quality, the drone of keyboards echoes eerily down the long halls. When one evening her husband Joseph disappears and then returns, offering no explanation as to his whereabouts, her creeping unease shifts decidedly to dread.

As other strange events build to a crescendo, the haunting truth about Josephine's work begins to take shape in her mind, even as something powerful is gathering its own form within her. She realizes that in order to save those she holds most dear, she must penetrate an institution whose tentacles seem to extend to every corner of the city and beyond. Both chilling and poignant, The Beautiful Bureaucrat is a novel of rare restraint and imagination. With it, Helen Phillips enters the company of Murakami, Bender, and Atwood as she twists the world we know and shows it back to us full of meaning and wonder-luminous and new.

A young wife's new job pits her against the universe in this inventive and compulsively page-turning first novel from "one of the most exciting young writers working today" (Jenny Offill).

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