Book summary

It's the end of the 20th century, and a Chicago advertising firm is beginning to capsize as the dot.com economy unravels. The slightly frantic employees scramble to keep their jobs, stay sane, and kill time. The "office" genre has had a renaissance lately in film, television, and fiction, and Joshua Ferris's devilishly funny novel, THEN WE CAME TO THE END, is a significant contribution to the world of white-collar fiction. Telling the tale in the first-person plural (à la THE VIRGIN SUICIDES), Ferris nevertheless manages to vividly portray numerous idiosyncratic individuals--including Chris Yop, the copywriter who continues to sneak into work even after he has been fired. Ferris has an uncanny knack for nailing the quotidian absurdities of office life, but perhaps his greatest accomplishment is that he captures the pleasures, albeit petty ones, of corporate life, and has a true sympathy for the strange shared experiences of modernity. THEN WE CAME TO THE END was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award.

Media reviews

"THEN WE CAME TO THE END...is neither small nor angry, but expansive, great-hearted, and acidly funny....[Joshua Ferris] is fluent in the language of white-collar wordsmiths."