London and the south-east
Subtitle: a novel
By: David Szalay
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2017
Language: eng
Number of pages: 340
ISBN-13: 9781555977931
Subjects: Social conditions; Fiction; Sales personnel; Career changes
Description: "Paul Rainey, the hapless antihero at the center of this "compulsively readable" (Independent on Sunday) story works, miserably, in ad sales. He sells space in magazines that hardly exist, and through a fog of booze and drugs dimly perceives that he is dissatisfied with his life--professionally, sexually, recreationally, the whole nine yards. If only there were something he could do about it--and "something" seems to fall into his lap when a meeting with an old friend and fellow salesman, Eddy Jaw, leads to the offer of a new job. But when that offer turns out to be as misleading as Paul's own sales patter, his life is transformed in ways very much more peculiar than he ever thought possible. London and the South-East, which won the Betty Trask Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, is both a gloriously told shaggy-dog story about the compromising inanities of office life and consumer culture, and the perfect introduction to one of the best writers at work today."--Amazon.com.