Product Description

You are in a job you do not enjoy. You are surrounded by colleagues you do not respect. You feel you can do better. Your life feels directionless. You feel trapped. You drink to take your mind off it all. You dread Mondays. You hate your alarm clock with a passion. You worship Friday afternoons. You cherish the weekend. You loathe the inevitability of ironing, always ironing. You assess where you are going on every Sunday. You know you're not the big fish. You wonder if you ever want to be. You are stuck on repeat. You are in an endless cycle of working, drinking and making coffee. You want a way out. You want to escape this way of thinking. You want to enjoy life, all the time. You want fulfilment. You want freedom. You want to read this book. In a large London law firm, trainee solicitor Denton Voyle contemplates why he is pursuing a career in law. Every Sunday afternoon, with nothing better to look forward to than the ironing, he questions his miserable, listless, alcohol fuelled existence and wonders if the pursuit of being the big fish could ever really satisfy him. He soon finds he is not alone and sets out to escape his fish Sunday thinking.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #257168 in Books
• Published on: 2005-07-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Customer Reviews

Office Life
This book very accurately covers that 'life's a routine' phase that every office worker hits at some point (normally in their 30's). This is the perfect brother of a book to 'You Are Here (Steve Horsfall), encapsulating that moment when we wonder where life is taking us. Set in a London Law firm but it could be anywhere and any profession (it's a world away from John Grisham). Loved the relaying of a drinking and girl chasing existance. The writing is fresh and quirky too.

I'll never get those hours back!
I've never written a book review on Amazon before but I feel compelled to do so now - if only to save you from the same fate of wasted hours and dissappointed groans as regularly as the clumsily delivered cliches you'll stumble across in this book.

The theory is fine: young guy being brow beaten in a dead end job, drinking his world away and dreading the inevitable return to work post Sunday. The story is tediously written. The prose is clunky, conversations are written out as you might write a memo to the CEO: superflous words beefing up an otherwise boring story that you'll find yourself skipping past just to speed things up. Good effort on the part of Alex Gilmore though in managing to write entire chapters of conversations without a single apostrope: every word stretched out on the page and not a single contracted word in sight. It's like reading my 7 year old nephew's English homework: "No, it is not and I do not believe for a second that we can not do this. We are all in this together!" yelled Randall. Find me one person in the word who yells like that without a "don't, can't, we're" and I'll show you an asbergers Rainman.

Every mundane moment of the characters life is attempted to be livened up by unrelated and tenuous analogies and metaphores. It just drags the story out to 348 pages of tripe.

If you're going to read this book I'd suggest you skip straight to page 247 because that's when something actually happens. I know this because I was so gobsmacked when I read it that I had to dog ear the page to tell someone that this might just finally pay off. It didn't.

Good luck wading through this literary treacle.

Amusing Book about Office Life
The first part of this book was a very amusing tale of life as a trainee professional and although geared towards the legal profession the humour translates to the profession I am trained in (accountancy). The stories of hours of photocopying and then hours at the pub are very true to life as is the stories of bed hopping.

The book is let down in the later part by a rather unbelievable convoluted plot which is a pity given the first 2/3 of the book