In a windowless office,a woman explains something from her real,nonwork life - about the frustration and indignity of returning her online shopping - to her colleagues. One wears a topknot. Another checks her pedometer.
Watching them all is Millie. Thirty-years-old and an eternal temp,she says almost nothing,almost all of the time.
But then the possibility of a permanent job arises. Will it bring the new life Millie is envisioning - one involving a gym membership,a book club,and a lot less beer and TV - finally within reach Or will it reveal just how hollow that vision has become
Publisher: Orion Publishing CoISBN: 9781474612296Number of pages: 208Weight: 188 gDimensions: 196 x 128 x 20 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
'Halle Butler is a first-rate satirist of the horror show being sold to us as Modern Femininity. She is Thomas Bernhard in a bad mood,wearing ill-fitting tights,scrutinizing old take-out leftovers. The New Meshows us the futility of betterment in an increasingly paranoid era of self-improvement,one in which the female body is grated into little bloody empowered bits of itself. A dark comedy of female rage. Fcking hilarious.'- Catherine Lacey
'The New Merenders contemporary American life in such vivid,stinging color,that certain sentences are liable to give the reader a paper cut. But you'll want to keep on reading anyway. Halle Butler is terrific,and I loved this book.'- Kelly Link
'A bouncy,profane,highly addictive novel about work,female friendship,and other alienations. Halle Butler's insane talent shimmers on every page of this deadpan misanthrope's ode. A must-read!'- Claire Vaye Watkins
'Halle Butler has a way of looking at our 21st-century neoliberalist condition that simultaneously exposes its brutality and renders that same brutality absurd,hilarious,fizzy with humor. She's an incisive,curmudgeonly bard of the uniquely precarious times we live in,and it is crucial that you read her immediately.'- Alexandra Kleeman
'A bleak and brutal book that exposes a nearly unbearable futility to life in the workforce,not to mention life outside of it. Butler's vision is funny and raw and dark-a cautionary tale,hilarious and intimate,against growing up and making do.'- Ben Marcus
'Painfully and hilariously socially astute. Sometimes I wasn't sure if I was crying with laughter or just sympathetic misanthropy. Millie is caustically funny,obstructively depressive and self-consciously complicit in an endless mise en abyme of utter vapidity and I am absolutely in love with her.'- Luke Kennard,author of The Transition
'A novel so darkly funny and acutely observed that it feels like a documentary; a state-of-the-nation book about the Millenial condition.'- Andrew McMillan,author of physical
'Funny and infuriating,shocking,clever,and hugely entertaining.'-Roddy Doyle
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