A Day at the Office (Fiction)

This book is a day and a night in the life of a Scottish city, seen through the imaging eye of a dreaming worker, who conjures to life the novel’s three motor characters — Ray, age nineteen; Helen, twenty-four, and Douglas, twenty-nine. Their connection is brief, yet inevitable in the fact that they are all parts of the single psyche, that of the dreamer/conjuror. A Day at the Office is the story of Edinburgh in the year of the fall of the Berlin wall. A snapshot of time in its long history, of which the year 1990 is a short footnote. It is story about the effect death has on the living, a love story, a story about the pull of drugs. It is a story about margins, how difficult it is to escape them, and a rare convincing portrait of the Scottish working class. It is about the distance between what’s on the TV and the drudgery of daily existence for ordinary people. Daring, truly experimental, formally inventive, quietly lyrical, it is a book unlike anything else you’ve ever read.