Then We Came to the End

Aug 10, 2025 8:56 AM

Author:Joshua Ferris

A HILARIOUS SATIRE THAT SHOWS OFFICE DYNAMICS AT THEIR MOST PETTY AND PROFOUND FROM THE BOOKER PRIZE-SHORTLISTED AUTHOR, JOSHUA FERRIS

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, clinging to his ergonomic chair; Lynn, the boss, whose breast cancer everyone pretends not to talk about; Carl, secretly taking someone else's medication; Marcia, 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.

Then We Came to the End is about sitting all morning next to someone you cross the road to avoid at lunch. It's the story of your life and mine.

*Joshua Ferris' mind-blowing new book, A Calling for Charlie Barnes, is available to pre-order now.*

'Very funny, intense and exhilarating . . . For the first time in fiction, it has truly captured the way we work' The Times

'As dazzling as Franzen's The Corrections and as confident as Tartt's The Secret History . . . Exceptional, very funny' Daily Telegraph

'Slick, sophisticated and very funny, Ferris's cracking debut has modern Everyman fighting for his identity in an increasingly impersonal world' Daily Mail

Reviews

Outstanding, hugely satisfying, exceptionally well-executed . . . An incisive, urgent, funny and snappily written novel

—— Sunday Times Magazine

As impressively confident as Donna Tartt's The Secret History and as technically dazzling as Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections . . . Exceptional, funny, radical

—— Telegraph

Brilliant, funny, stomach-turningly accurate

—— Observer

At the heart of Trollope's tightly written, acutely observed novel is what it means to be a family

—— New Statesman

This is a novel about the modern affairs of the heart. It explores the dilemmas of men who won't commit themselves and women who yearn for sublime romantic love

—— Daily Mail

[Trollope writes] with such elegant precision - revelatory and ambiguous at just the right moments

—— Evening Standard

A cruelly funny book... most astute observation

—— Daily Telegraph

Subtle and delicate

—— The Sunday Times

La Ronde for the new century

—— Independent

Friction is a bellow of rage and disgust at the eagerness with which the 21st century soul attenuates itself. That this trivia-obsessed, pornography-fraught and digitised-to-death world that we have made for ourselves can produce such high art, and with such slicing satirical humour, is one of the central paradoxes, and causes for celebration, of our age

—— Niall Griffiths

Neill bucks the chick-lit trend with prose that's clever and endearing, and frazzled parents will love the way she nails the sticky, hair-pulling mania of domestic life

—— Washington Post

A deftly executed domestic comedy

—— Boston Globe

Hilarious . . . Plays with the chaos and comedy of 30-something metropolitan maternity and brings it to an unexpectedly moving conclusion

—— Anna Wintour , Vogue

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