Then We Came to the End

Joshua Ferris' Then We Came To The End - part of the limited edition PENGUIN STREET ART series: timeless writing, enduring design.

'We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise. At least those of us who smoked had something to look forward to at ten-fifteen'

They spend their days - and too many of their nights - at work. Away from friends and family, they share a stretch of stained carpet with a group of strangers they call colleagues. There's Chris Yop, clinging to his ergonomic chair; Lynn Mason, the boss, whose breast cancer everyone pretends not to talk about; Carl Garbedian, secretly taking someone else's medication; Marcia Dwyer, whose hair is stuck in the eighties; and Benny, who's just - well, just Benny. Amidst the boredom, redundancies, water cooler moments, meetings, flirtations and pure rage, life is happening, to their great surprise, all around them.

'Outstanding . . . incisive, urgent, funny and snappily written' Sunday Times

Joshua Ferris was born in Illinois in 1974. He is the author of Then We Came to the End, which was published in 2007 and was nominated for the National Book Award and longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, and The Unnamed. In 2010 he was selected for the New Yorker's prestigious '20 under 40' list as one of the best young American writers of fiction. He lives in New York.

The PENGUIN STREET ART series marries timeless writing with enduring design. Some of the world's leading street artists have designed new covers especially for ten classic contemporary books from Penguin: Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd / Armadillo by William Boyd / And The Ass Saw the Angel by Nick Cave / What a Carve Up by Jonathan Coe / Americana by Don DeLillo / Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris / The Reluctant Fundamentalistby Mohsin Hamid / The Believers by Zoe Heller / How to Be Good by Nick Hornby / Lights out for the Territory by Iain Sinclair