Help Wanted

Clock in for a night shift - and for a moving multi-perspective novel about an exploited workforce that will be a major event in American letters

A superb, empathic comedy of manners. Perhaps the most impressive thing about Help Wanted is that Waldman manages, in telling her small story, to describe not just the American economic prison but the global one. So: both a novel of manners and a systems novel, a book that shows us, perhaps, how intimately linked these apparently disparate genres were all along

Waldman applies her sharp sense for relational drama and dark comedy to the retail sector... The book shines

Tightly plotted, slyly caustic and often very funny, it's hugely enjoyable

Waldman is a sharp observer of the world, a writer whose attention to particulars only sharpens the bigger picture

Scathing, often humorous and sharply observed ... Waldman's writing is richest and most humane as she traces each worker's private ambitions

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

At once familiar yet revelatory in its specificity ... Waldman crafts her characters' endearing and off-putting qualities with absolutely zero condescension. Reading it, we root for everyone

Could not be more fascinating or more fun

Poignant, funny, stealthily ambitious

A smart satire of skulduggery and drudgery

Funny, empathetic and gloriously real

Shows Waldman's gift for subtle, devastating satire ... corporate hypocrisy and the futility of hard graft are skewered in this novel on working culture in a New York superstore

An astute social commentary on the gruelling lives of low-wage workers

Funny, gloriously real and empathetic, and a moving reminder that everyone is the main character of their own life

Waldman writes with remarkable empathy while also mining the dark humour in the foibles of any workplace

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

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

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

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

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

What a gorgeous and ingenious and heartfelt work Help Wanted is!

Help Wanted isn't just smart and funny and wise. It's also vital to our understanding of how and why the American dream is becoming increasingly inaccessible to working-class Americans

A funny, poignant work of fiction ... I recommend it, too, for its insights into leadership, motivation and the hidden world of work

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.