Falling Sideways

There has never been any shortage of business at the Tank, a high-profile firm in Copenhagen. There are round-table meetings to attend, circular memos to write, colleagues to indirectly undermine.But when the Tank's nefarious CEO announces a period of downsizing, everyone is exposed and the game-playing begins in deadly earnest. Top executive Frederick Breathwaite suspects his days might be numbered, and is frantically trying to ensure a foothold on the career ladder for his son Jes. Harald Jaeger, estranged from his wife and daughters, harbours desperate passions for an alarming number of women (including, dangerously, the Tank's married financial officer). Lost in his amorous fantasies, he has somehow managed to catch the CEO's eye - as a possible replacement for Breathwaite. Meanwhile the CEO's son Adam should be following in his father's alpha-male footsteps but instead is head-over-heels in puppy love with his au pair. And in a nearby shoe repair shop, Jes, who personally can't imagine anything worse than his father's corporate life, is pursuing a very different kind of future. As the city settles into autumn,a season of brittle days and foreboding nights, the impending downsizing causes a ripple effect that touches not just every employee in the Tank but their spouses, children and lovers as well. Sharp, funny but remarkably tender, Falling Sideways is a shrewdly observed tale of ambition and anxiety, of backstabbing and backsliding, of office politics and family affairs.

About the Author :
Thomas E. Kennedy was born in New York. He is the author of eight novels, as well as several collections of short stories and essays, and has won numerous awards including the Eric Hoffer Award, the Pushcart Prize, the O. Henry Prize and the National Magazine Award. He teaches creative writing at Fairleigh Dickinson University, and is the father of two grown children. He has lived in Copenhagen for over two decades.

Review :
Falling Sideways is the finest novel I have read in many years. Thomas Kennedy is a true discovery, an author of rare intelligence and moral vision. Not least, the book is immensely compelling and beautifully written Kennedy gives us the complacency, the envy, the flirtations and the sycophantic laughter that will be familiar to anyone who has worked beneath strip-lighting ... This is a small novel in a minor key, as nimble and intimate as a piece of chamber music. But when it does reach outside the immediate world of Copenhagen, it touches on the contemporary moment with a deft precision. The fear of losing one's job, the rejection of the corporate world by the young and the treatment of immigrants by different generations are all of the utmost timeliness Falling Sideways is that rarest of commodities in American literary fiction, a novel about men and women at work; it is part satire and part drama, and it is very smart Surprisingly touching ... In the younger generation's contempt for their parents' materialism, Kennedy offers a welcome, if tentative, message of hope This witty, dark, Franzen-style tale of a downsizing company features backstabbing execs who betray each other and their own families ... One for anyone who has ever had a job they hate ‘Thomas has an ear and eye for modern life. He knows how neighborhoods gentrify, how kids stay in lousy apartments for "street cred"; he knows how women long for children after their career has used up the time of their unquestioned fertility, and most of all he knows Copenhagen' A quietly impressive novel that has much to say about the way we live and work now As he slots together his narratives with masterly elegance, an intimate picture of local life is set before us ... Kennedy's finely calibrated observations make his cast eminently believable It is a funny insight into the world of back-stabbing and office politics A fiercely funny, sharp take on office life