Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3211 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

The Times
Very funny, intense and exhilarating ... For the first time in fiction, it has truly captured the way we work

Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday
It's a long time since I've read a novel so painfully funny, or so absurdly true

Sunday Times
Outstanding ... incisive, urgent, funny and snappily written ... The comedy debut of the year

Customer Reviews

A Marvelous Read, but for a VERY Specific Audience
I can understand the mixed reviews of this book, though I loved every page of it and wished it would never end. To appreciate it, you not only need to have worked in an office, you need to have worked in this KIND of office.

I happened to work in two offices where everyone had their noses in everyone else's business, where people had conniptions over nonsense such as where their "legitimate" chair is located, and whether or not the axe will fall anytime soon. That it is set in the Spring and Summer just prior to 9/11 is no accident; the economy was already starting to tank and 9/11 only made things worse for those teetering on the brink. In this office, people are being fired right and left, but the remaining folks are more worried about the health situation of their boss and the private lives of their co-workers. Who has a crush on whom? Who is a complete whackjob? This is office life, folks, at least in my old office.

This book is so full of quotable lines and great twists that there isn't much I can say without giving it away. People who have worked in my situation will likely love it. People who haven't, or who don't enjoy programs such as The Office because they hit too close to home, will not like it at all.

Joshua Ferris is an excellent writer and this is a stunning debut. I'm very much looking forward to what comes next.

Gave up - not funny or interesting
Like the person before - I seldom give up on a book, but this just felt like a waste of my life. Couldn't fnd the humour or any real plot. Maybe it came good in the end - but I doubt it

Then we came to the end - and we were very glad that we did
Life is short, far too short to spend chained to an office desk. This seems to be one of the messages in Joshua Ferris's debut. Well, life certainly is too short to spend reading books like this.

If you believe the reviews, blurb and cover quotes, this poor attempt at a darkly satirical study of office politics and minutiae is a riotous romp that lays office life bare in hilarious fashion. The truth is that this book reads like it was written by someone who has read some other books about working in an office, or possibly seen a film or two. The writing does not suggest that the author himself in fact has experienced real office life for any length of time. The result in this case is an abject lack of true insight and a shallow narrative that barely scratches the surface of the 9 to 5 (or longer) corporate culture and which is embarrassingly unfunny. Quite simply, Ferris does not understand the world he is trying to portray (which becomes very obvious very early on) and consequently, he has nothing of value to tell us about it.

The book has no real plot or character development, albeit that recurring themes are present. The patchwork of vignettes about office goings-on that are presented here are not witty, perceptive, true-to-life, or entertaining. The chapter in which we get an insight into the life of a particular office worker, planted randomly into the middle of some tedious nonsense Ferris has set down about dismantling a chair or storing a totem pole (hilarious this stuff is not) is the book's strongest and most effective section, but even these passages are not wholly convincing and feel artificially inserted in an attempt to lend this novel a gravitas and meaning that are missing from the rest of the book.

Ferris clearly has talent, though it is woefully misdirected here, and this book might have earned two stars from me, were it not for the underlying sense of smugness with which it has been written, as if it is truly enlightening all us mere minions as to office life and the pointlessness thereof. "Then We Came To The End" is a misfire that has been wildly overhyped. It is shallow at its core, and indeed, on every ill-informed page, and I am sorry I spent any of my precious life on this planet outside of the office reading it. My feeling upon coming to the end was annoyance at the time I had wasted on it.