Help Wanted: A Barack Obama Reading Pick 2024

Included in Barack Obama's Summer Reading List 2024
'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

'An immersive, deeply affecting human drama' Bookseller, March 2024 Book of the Month

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.

About the Author :
Adelle Waldman is the best-selling author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., which was named a best book of the year by the New Yorker, Economist, NPR, Elle, and many others. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, among other publications. She lives in New York State.

Review :
'A brilliant diagnosis and a moving account of retail workers hidden in plain sight all around us whose full humanity has simply never been so richly displayed or touchingly rendered' - Joshua Ferris, author of Then We Came to the End

'A classic of our age. Adelle Waldman turns the seemingly unremarkable matter of a retail job vacancy into a gripping study of conscience, morality and camaraderie. Help Wanted illuminates an entire universe that rarely features in literature revealing rich, nuanced, characters and the choices they face' - Catherine O'Flynn, author of What Was Lost

'Finally, the profoundly human big-box store truck-unloading novel you were waiting for. 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. The characters are so richly drawn-so full, under all their defences, of the desire to be loved-that even the annoying ones will win your heart. When the book came to an end, I felt bereft. Adelle Waldman is a master' - Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot

'I can't think of a book more necessary. Adelle Waldman takes us into the universe of American labour with generosity and compassion ... Simply enthralling' - Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story

'Help Wanted is a serious moral inquiry, through the medium of fiction, into the lives of a group of people who work in a big-box store in an American town that has seen better days. It's a book 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. This book should be assigned in business schools, but it won't be; the world it depicts is not the one dreamt of in their philosophy' - Keith Gessen, author of A Terrible Country