About the Book
SHORTLISTED FOR THE NERO PRIZE FOR DEBUT FICTION
SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE
Plans for the expansion of the Capmeadow Business Park are in full swing - its mission is to become the greatest business park in the region. Tom Crowley, a mid-level employee, loses his daughter at 'bring your daughter to work day'. He raises the alarm, and his colleagues rush to help him find her. Eventually, after no sign of her is found, it transpires she was never there. And yet, as time goes on, Tom still cannot reconcile that she is really at home. Refusing to accept that she is safe, Tom continues to search for her in the maze of corridors and impossible multi-dimensional spaces that make up his place of work...
Because Capmeadow is expanding in unexpected ways, a Liaison Officer becomes the central focus for complaints about how the expansion is impacting the lives of the employees - unexpected buildings, years-long business days, cursed farmers' markets, and corridors of the mind are draining the life from Tom and everyone he works with.
Years pass, and Tom remains at the company, convinced he is in the presence of his now adult daughter. But has he judged it correctly? And can anything go back to the way it was??
About the Author :
Ben Pester is the author of the short story collection Am I in the Right Place? He lives in London. The Expansion Project is his first novel.
Review :
This debut by a young British talent, both office satire and weird thriller, is that rare thing: unique' Telegraph 'Greatest Books of 2025'
Excellent
A tour de force in surrealist comedy... Fresh, sublime and eerie. He could be described, in part, as a comic descendant of J.G. Ballard... Pester is a talented writer of the surreal... A novel about dislocation that feels dislocating. It should serve as an ominous warning to us all
Surreal and unsettling... Pester's deceptively lucid prose mocks office platitudes but also gets to the crux of the loneliness and alienation bred by corporate language and spaces... With a steely commitment to its outlandish form and plot, Pester's novel is as nebulous, mind-bending and delightfully strange as the workplace it describes
This ambitious debut skewers the absurdities of office life and bureaucracy with sharp, surreal wit... Crackles with invention... Pester has an ear for deadpan absurdity... Exhilaratingly weird
[Pester] has succeeded in creating an extreme "drowning out" of the normal sounds of human life and activity. I appreciated Pester's well-executed vision of a genuinely soul-sucking workplace... Magical, folk horror-informed and time-twisting. A world lurking unseen alongside everyday linear British life
It's within the mundane that Pester lodges (or dislodges) the strangest things... Pester's satirical and surreal scrutiny pushes the concept of the 'work-life balance' to its limit... Pester's fiction is its own beast. You have to wonder where he gets his ideas... This is not a cheerful book, but it is a funny one
A debut novel with echoes of Kafka, Flaubert and the office sitcom... Both poignant and disconcerting... Beautifully observed... A fever dream of a novel - disconcerting, strange and unexpectedly touching
[An] absorbing blend of mystery, confusion and corporate over-reach... Pester's prose captures the dreamy, emotional dysfunction of the workplace
If you think you are about to read a realist novel about everyday life and work in 21st century England, you have another thing coming... A radically untethered fictional world... Splendidly inventive... A wonderfully strange and haunting book
A magnificent destabilising rendering of work life which is both familiar and totally foreign; boundaries between the real and the mediated, the father and the man, the worker and the person, all begin to warp and bleed. Disturbing, funny and deeply odd, this is a novel for the ages, but especially ours
'An office novel of a very different kind... A horror story about screen society, in which sensations are constant and images refuse to separate into the real and imagined
Ben Pester renders the baffling peculiarity of employment with a subversive imagination that should get him fired. The Expansion Project is a weird, unsettling, moving book about how we are lost from each other - and ourselves - in a labyrinth we made, and which now makes us
Terrific. An offbeat and deft exploration of memory, grief and parental love. Ben Pester continues to impress me with his talents
It's one thing to write a subversive novel; another thing altogether to write a subversive novel that gives narrative ballast to its batshit. Here is a novel that does. A surrealist nightmare that flows with its own logic, humour, politics and plot energy
I can think of few other writers who can seamlessly blend the hyper-real and the humane, or make the allegorical hit home with this emotional depth. Pester is a genius of capturing the vicissitudes of contemporary life... The Expansion Project imbues the absurd with soul... Mordantly funny but never cynical... At times frightening, at times genuinely moving in a way I wish I knew how to do. This is an eagerly awaited debut novel... and it delivers on every expectation. Ultimately revitalising, and heralds what I hope might be a new direction in UK fiction
A profoundly moving, extraordinary novel that deftly combines the numinous and otherworldly with the prosaic and quotidian to the most powerful emotional effect. Witty, touching, layered and entirely original
Ben Pester is my favourite cartographer for that zone in the soul where panic shades into true metaphysical horror... He makes it look so easy... His emotional range is too deep for us to feel manipulated. We panic with his characters. They say our panic in their words... A clean, stinging joy, a disquieted ache, a clean reminder of how hard it is to have to be here, and how much harder again to have to leave
A slippery jewel of a novel that refracts received notions on work and family to ask: at what point do we realise we have stepped out of the life we thought we had? It casts light on the fog of corporate language which makes the world unrecognisable, and which wraps itself around our frailties until we also cannot recognise ourselves. This is a luminous and startling novel from a unique new voice
A fever-dream of a book... This surreal trip into a Severance-esque corporate world is deeply unsettling, compelling and very entertaining. I loved it
I was mesmerised by this inventive, stifled scream of a novel about work, time, space and relationships under late capitalism, full of the eerie strangeness of Severance, by way of Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, Graeme Macrae Burnet's Case Study and Olga Ravn's The Employees... This is an essential read
Labelled part of a wave of 'Severance lit' by the Sunday Times, Ben Pester's book is a melancholy slice of sci-fi, with shades of Kazuo Ishiguro, glimmers of Philip K. Dick's Ubik... Pester carefully captures something specific of the alienation and disintegration that comes from ever-expanding "work", all while making his central family story touching without veering into sentimental
