Convenience Store Woman meets My Year of Rest and Relaxation in this strange, compelling, darkly funny tale of one woman's search for meaning in the modern workplace.
A young woman walks into an employment agency and requests a job that has the following traits: it is close to her home, and it requires no reading, no writing - and ideally, very little thinking. She is sent to a nondescript 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 can be so inconvenient and tiresome.
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...
Translated by Polly Barton.
ISBN 9781526622259
It's summer behind the Iron Curtain, and six girls are about to swim their way to the Olympics - and a new life. In an unnamed Soviet state, six girls meet each day to swim. At first, they play, splashing each other and floating languidly on the water's surface.
But soon the game becomes something more. They hone their bodies relentlessly. Their skin shades into bruises.
They barter cigarettes stolen from the factory where they work for swimsuits to stretch over their sunburnt skin. They tear their legs into splits, flick them back and forth, like herons. They force themselves to stop breathing.
When they find themselves representing their country as synchronised swimmers in the Olympics, they seize the chance they have been waiting for to escape and begin new lives. Scattered around the globe, six women live in freedom. But will they ever be able to forget what they left behind?
Translated by Cristina Sandu.
ISBN 9781913348236