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'Surreal and unsettling' OBSERVER CULTURAL HIGHLIGHT
'Wise, comical and exceptionally relatable' ZEBA TALKHANI
'Quietly hilarious and deeply attuned to the uncanny rhythms and deadpan absurdity of the daily grind' SHARLENE TEO
A woman walks into an employment agency and requests a job that requires no reading, no writing – and ideally, very little thinking.
She is sent to an office building where she is tasked with watching the hidden-camera feed of an author suspected of storing contraband goods. But observing someone for hours on end isn't so easy. How will she stay awake? When can she take delivery of her favourite brand of tea? And, perhaps more importantly – how did she find herself in this situation in the first place?
As she moves from job to job, writing bus adverts for shops that mysteriously disappear, and composing advice for rice cracker wrappers that generate thousands of devoted followers, it becomes increasingly apparent that she's not searching for the easiest job at all, but something altogether more meaningful...
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Kikuko Tsumura was born in Osaka, Japan. In her first job out of college, Tsumura experienced workplace harassment and quit after ten months to retrain and find another position, an experience that inspired her to write stories about young workers. She has won numerous Japanese literary awards including the Akutagawa Prize and the Noma Literary New Face Prize, and her first short story translated into English, ‘The Water Tower and the Turtle’, won a PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. The Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology recognized Tsumura’s work with a New Artist award in 2016. |
| Category: | Fiction |
| ISBN: | 9781526622242 |
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| On sale: | December 2020 |
| Format: | Paperback |
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