From daydreaming about sex to the politics of tea-making, Melville’s reluctant scrivener to Sylvia Plath’s New York internship, here are some of the best books about the nine-to-five
It makes sense to me that one of the bestselling genres in China is the workplace novel. The most popular has sold 5m copies and is called Du Lala’s Promotion Diary: it combines soap-opera twists with career advice of the machiavellian kind (“If your boss makes a pass at you, smile and flirt back”) to tell the story of a secretary rising to the position of HR manager. But this is a genre you don’t find in Britain. It didn’t bother me that the books I read rarely dealt with work until I moved to London to find a job: the novels I knew spoke to me of love and betrayal and the particular colour of a Cornish sky, but rarely of the politics of tea-making, everyday ambition or the entwined pleasures and duties of work. Here are some books that do.
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