I Hope This Finds You Well, the debut novel from Persian British Canadian writer Natalie Sue, is a smart, punchy novel full of heart that reminded me very much of Really Good, Actually by Monica Heisey and All This Could be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews (a National Book Award 2022 finalist which incidentally is on Kindle special at the moment).

Jolene is a young woman living and working a monotonous, unfulfilling office job in Calgary for Supershops Incorporated. She's depressed. riddled with anxiety, and hates her coworkers, amusing herself by writing them hidden messages in emails disgused in white font that they will never see, until she's caught and put on a personal disciplinary plan by HR. While completing the HR course designed to bring about her redemption, she becomes close to HR professional Cliff, a sensitive and kind guy who inadvertedly gives Jolene access to all of her co-workers' emails and chat groups.

As Jolene exposes her soul to Cliff but becomes increasingly enmeshed in a dilemma of her own making, can she extricate herself and prove to everyone, including her overbearing mother, that she is capable of getting her shit together or is she destined to remain in a cycle of chaos forever more?

What the author does well here is deal with some heavy topics with a light touch, while also showing perfect comic timing in her portrayal of Jolene's co-workers and Iranian family. All of the characters are a little crazy but there's something endearing about most of them, especially Jolene and Cliff, and as a reader you find yourself willing Jolene not to crumble under the pressure of it all. It's billed as being for fans of The Office which I think is spot on, and if you enjoyed the two books mentioned above and/or Fleabag, I think you'd love this one too. 4/5 stars

*Many thanks to @boroughpress @harpercollinsire @courtneysbooks for the advance copy in exchange for an honest review. I Hope This Finds You Well will be published later this month on 23 May.

I had a lot of fun reading this book. You might think the situation is quite low stakes, accessing emails and petty office gossip etc. You would be wrong. Let me tell you my heart was in my throat every time Jolene was snooping around and almost getting caught I felt a bit ill! All of those shenanigans are no doubt very entertaining. However, Natalie Sue does address some much more serious issues. Primarily, Jolene's crippling anxiety and self hatred. I think the way Jolene feels - lonely, lost, wasting her life and generally not good enough - is something a lot of people can relate to. I enjoyed her character arc and the way that every character was explored very well. There are no heroes and villains here, Sue makes sure that every character is multi dimensional which I really appreciated. I also enjoyed learning about the Persian community as I hadn't really read anything about that community before. Overall, this was a really great book that explored the life of a stagnating office and finding the humanity in the people that work there.

I Hope This Finds You Well by Natalie Sue is a humorous take on office politics and workplace relationships. It is a very assured debut and I look forward to reading more of this talented author's work.

3.5*

As someone who works in the office and is quite familiar with its culture, I was very interested in the premise of this book. It made me think of the time when me and my work bestie would jokingly ask each other 'For how much money would you sell your Teams messages to the upper management?' and we would always say 'No money in the world', because we talked too much shit about work and our colleagues.

Well, in this book, employees didn't have to make such a choice, because it was made for them when due to unexpected mistake, one employee - not upper management - gained access to everyone's emails and chats. Jolene is a secretary that has been in the same position for years and she gets freaked out when her offence at work, instead of setting additional security measures, lets her access personal conversations of her co-workers. At first, she tries to tell HR about the mistake, but as the rumours of layoffs reach her ears, Jolene decides to instead use this to her advantage and save her job.

After that happens, Jolene's actions are questionable at best and extremely inappropriate at worst. You want to root for her, because she's a recluse in her office and people seem to be weirded out by her for no particular reason, but it is hard since she reads everyone's correspondence and knows their personal affairs. That is the thought that haunted me throughout the whole book, but I think that was actually the point - to understand why Jolene is doing what she is doing and decide if that is something you can support or not.

I really liked how the characters were portrayed and they felt fully fleshed out, with their own quirks and different personalities, exactly like the people that you might find at work - just a bunch of people who somehow started working at the same place despite having different backgrounds, personalities and hobbies. I liked how even if Jolene was the main character, there was enough space to get to know others just as well, as their stories continued to be told throughout the whole book. I think this was the strongest part of the book for me, which made me like it as much as I did.

Thank you to NetGalley and HarperCollins UK, HarperFiction for providing me with an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest opinions!

Jolene has long given up hope that her office life is anything other than a monotonous trudge broken up by colleagues weird and annoying behaviour and passive aggressive digs that all seemed designed specifically to test her boundaries. But, she has come up with the perfect way of coping. White text p.s. messages at the bottom of emails so she can vent her grievances. Which is all fine, until one particularly stressful day she forgets to change the text to white. Now she has to attend sensitivity training with the new HR guy Cliff, who can’t possibly be the good person he pretends to be, and have her emails monitored. Only there is a massive IT mix up and she suddenly has access to everyone’s emails and instant messages. It’s perfect. With layoffs around the corner she has found a way to stay ahead of her hellish colleagues. Only when she starts seeing the secret details of their lives it doesn’t seem quite as simple as she first thought and maybe coming outside of cubicle wouldn’t be the nightmare she imagined.

I can be accused of being a bit boring, I don’t often stray outside of the authors and genres I know I like, but in this instance, I am so glad I did. This is Natalie Sue’s debut novel, and it was fantastic. Interesting, insightful and a lot of fun. And if you, like me, work or have worked in an office environment before this book will touch you on a visceral level. We have all had to sit at our desk and put up with the horrible smell of someone else’s reheated lunch or been subject to passive aggressive barbed words barely disguised as polite chit chat or had that boss. It made it so much easier to empathise with the Jolene. As even when she was a bit unlikable, she was completely understandable.

This book tackles a number of issues; grief, bullying, family, mental health and alcoholism to name a few. Jolene carries a lot of emotional baggage and seeing how that has isolated her from both her family and anyone who tries to befriend her can be a heart wrenching and frustrating experience. This book is told from her POV and although she isn’t an unreliable narrator per se, we as the reader can see how some of the choices she makes are less about what is happening externally, and more about the filters she has in her own mind to interpret what is happening. Essentially, she misleads herself. Her having access to everyone’s emails and instant messages finally gives her an insight into the people around her that she just can’t seem to get to on her own. It is the perfect set up for a story that is both emotional and moving and downright hilarious. All with a little bit of romance on the side.

I Hope This Finds You Well has been one of my favourite reads of this year and I recommend giving it a try. It was uplifting, funny and insightful and may make you look at your work colleagues in a slightly kinder light. This is only Natalie Sue’s debut, I don’t know what she will bring out next but I do know I will be reading it.

An interesting story of people with hidden hardships in life, this book develops themes which aren’t often found in novels. I did enjoy this story, but it wasn’t one of those unputdownable books.

In this novel, we follow Jolene, a socially awkward, lonely, slightly toxic protagonist who, after a slight HR mishap, can read other people's emails and plans to game her way to not getting fired.

Her micro-aggressive judgments about her co-workers and emotional distancing, to name a few, are defence mechanisms for her to cope with working at a place where she never felt supported and belonged in. Through her social mishaps, professionalism, boundaries, loneliness, forming communities, taking risks to trust others, and faith in others are explored. Yes, Jolene could've afforded to be more honest. Yes, she could try stepping out of her self-exile and self-pity pit more to find the happiness and peace she really wanted. Yes, she could've communicated more so fewer misunderstandings would happen and she would get to happier places. But it's all very human and understandable, considering where Jolene comes from (figuratively). And yet, bit by bit, implosion after implosion, Jolene gets to the point where she commits to pulling herself together so she's well to accept anything that comes her way, unfortunate emails or otherwise.

This book comes at an interesting time when digital technology has brought workplaces to homes, increased productivity, and isolated individuals. Generational divides are dividing up "expert" opinions about the impacts on the workplace. The loneliness pandemic might be the "Great Depression" of the 2020s.

It's a relevant read that leaves much to ponder.

Thanks to Netgalley and HarperCollins UK for providing me with the e-ARC/DRC in exchange for an honest review.

This book really resonated with me, bringing back memories of my own experiences in office settings. Despite the familiarity, I was captivated by its exploration of corporate relationships. The author skillfully blends wit and heartfelt emotion, presenting relatable characters and office dynamics that highlight power struggles, office politics, and the emotional rollercoaster of corporate life. The witty writing style adds a delightful touch of humor to the narrative, making it both engaging and thought-provoking.

I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in a sharp and insightful portrayal of office dynamics. It's a must-read for gaining new perspectives on workplace relationships and the complexities of corporate environments. Whether you've encountered similar situations or simply enjoy character-driven stories with depth, this book offers a compelling journey through the intricacies of office life that will leave you reflecting on your own experiences long after you've finished reading.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It was funny, heartwarming, sad & slightly stressful ! It made a very good read.

First off, I absolutely adore Miley & just wanted her to be happy throughout the whole book. Rhonda as well ? What a sweetie. I don’t know whether this is because I’m in the middle of a rewatch of The Office, but I definitely pictured Phyllis whilst reading !

Jolene was interesting. In some parts, she annoyed me as she was just being so careless & I found it stressful in parts ! The ending though really made me tear up ! I feel so proud of her, she had such a journey !

The writing was very good & kept me engaged throughout. I did really enjoy this book & even got emotional at the end ! Highly recommend !

I received a free review copy from the publisher in exchange for my honest unedited feedback. Thank you NetGalley!

The book follows Jolene in her mundane 9-5 office job, when suddenly an incident means that she has access to all of her colleagues emails and private messages. With the rumours about lay-offs circling, she wonders whether this new power could help her.

I loved getting to know all of the different characters and seeing their storylines and interpersonal relationships progress. The character progression was *chefs kiss*. I feel like this book shows you the best and worst of normal people, and in a weird way that comforted me.

I LOVE JOLENE! She is the perfect unlikable, morally grey, satire main character that you can’t help but love even when you want to shake her.

If you have ever worked in an office, you will absolutely love this. Having access to everyone’s emails and messages sounds like a dream to everyone who lives a bit of office gossip - but the reality is horrendous and I’ve actually realised it would be my worst nightmare. I was on the edge of my seat for the whole book, it really was a rollercoaster!

This book was a delightful surprise! It's filled with heartwarming and bittersweet moments that really caught me off guard—in the best way possible. What I loved most was how it mirrored real life, flaws and all. The messages it sends hit close to home, making the characters and their messy world feel incredibly relatable. Once I started, I couldn't stop turning the pages!

This was such a cool, original premise for a book and I was excited to read it. It didn’t let me down. The writing was fresh, smart and funny, I was surprised to find out this is the authors debut and I can’t wait to read what else she comes up with. Although her character was a tad unlikeable at first, who hasn’t felt like Joelene in their job at some point? I could certainly relate to her thoughts, if not her actions. There was a touch of Elenor Oliphant about this book, in a good way, Perceptive insight into office life and how you never really know what people have going on. Thanks Netgalley and the publisher.

I hope this finds you well is a novel about office politics, loneliness and trauma, with the idea of you don't know what everyone's going through as the constant background for it. I loved getting to know Jolene and the rest of the Supershops workers, and although I knew how it would all end up, it is still a very satisfying read due to the character building.

I absolutely loved this book! So funny and smart, with really well developed and relatable characters. An absolute joy to read!

Light and entertaining
Jolene, the main protagonist in this office world satire, is one of those misfits who see the worst everywhere and suffers from it. She loathes her job and all her co-workers and has a string of quite cruel descriptions of them. She doesn’t much love her flat or her lonely home life either. In fact she starts off as a thoroughly unlovable character. (As the book continues, we find that this is partly to do with a trauma in her past)
One of her less sensible habits is to add nasty comments to emails which she conceals by whiting them out. (Wow! Such a secure way to hide stuff!) And inevitably, one of these comments gets found out. Threats and horrible interviews follow and an HR person is detailed to mentor her in proper behaviour and also to set a watch on her computer. Only, somehow, she ends up being able to see all the emails from everyone in the company instead.
So, will she discover how much everyone really hates her? Will she find a way to keep her job? Will she carry on being a totally unlovable office misfit? It’s many years since I worked in an office and I seem to remember getting on well with most of my co-workers. So I was surprised to find that I actually did want to find out what happened to Jolene and Cliff and all her co-workers and how she dealt with her super-knowledge.
And indeed, it was quite a lively and entertaining read – not too tidy and obvious, some good plot lines and side characters thrown in to confuse matters. I enjoyed it. I didn’t find it hilarious though I did laugh a couple of times.
If there was a lesson in this novel it was, don’t assume you know anything about people. You’ll be wrong. Oh and don’t work in an office. Ever.

f you had the opportunity to read colleagues emails and DM’s, would you? What if they’re writing about you? Jolene gets that chance in this debut novel when an IT mix-up happens in the office she works at.
I really enjoyed the characters in this, they were written so well and likeable. As someone who works in an office, I had to read this and it kept me intrigued as I didn’t know where the story was going to go. The pace got pretty slow about 30% in, but the ending was very satisfying as I’d been rooting for Jolene and Cliff!

If you have ever worked in an office and had even a passing unpleasant thought about your co-workers, your boss or how much your job sucks in general, I think it’s likely you’ll enjoy reading I Hope This Finds You Well as much as I did.

When hapless, fed-up Jolene is accidentally given access to the emails of all her co-workers — co-workers she’s hated working with for the last eight years — she opens up a gateway to the office politics, tattling and backstabbing that she’s only had a passing awareness of for the last eight years.

She exploits this secret access to gain insights into her coworkers life, using this information against them to finally start climbing (or at least, succeed in not falling off) the corporate ladder. But with redundancies looming and the help of sweet new HR guy Cliff, Jolene starts wondering how much of her loneliness at work is her own doing. And if it’s possible that her time in the office is shaped by her struggles outside of it, is it possible the same could be said for her co-workers too?

I had a really good time reading this. Jolene’s a loveable and sympathetic character, despite how often she’s the root of her own problems, and the romantic subplot running through the novel was sweet without being too sickly. I related to a lot of the office dynamics — do we all have an office arch nemesis? — and navigating professional dynamics, especially when you constantly feel like you’re doing a bad job. I do think Jolene’s past needed a bit more work and thought, but that didn’t detract from a very funny look at the trials and tribulations of office culture, and a reminder that what’s on the surface isn’t always all there is.

Was this a wise book to read days before starting a new job? Possibly not!

Thank you for my NetGalley ARC @BoroughPress!


Review also published 29th April on Tackling.the.tbrs

Dear NetGalley and HarperCollins UK, I hope this finds you well. Thank you for giving me the chance to read an ARC and present you with an honest review. Please do not hesitate to contact me again should the opportunity arise. Kind regards.

Jolene Smith, a Canadian citizen of Iranian descent, has been working in the same office for the last 8 years, and she hates it, especially her seemingly terrible colleagues. Whenever she has to send one of them an email, she adds what she really thinks of them in white text colour so they can't see it. One day she gets caught and is made to complete an anti-harassment course with new HR employee and Warhammer nerd Cliff.

This part is funny and very relatable, with all the office politics, the backstabbing, micro aggressions and tattling to HR that is so rife in offices. If this book doesn't make a convincing case for WFH then what does?

"I had no idea yet about things like: working faster than everyone is bad, actually; not talking about your private life with colleagues is suspicious; and you have to be fake nice to powerful people even when they treat you horribly."

Jolene also suffers from anxiety and panic attacks. There is a lot of pain and sadness in her from an unresolved trauma because of her best friend Ellie's death years ago. It seems she never got therapy for it, and frankly, her overbearing Persian mother with her cultural expectations is no help. Consequently she often comes across as a bit of a brusque loner that looks down on her colleagues.

"So many office situations show no regard for people with anxiety, yet we’re the bad guys if we can’t cope."

Having started work with Cliff, we get into the territory of a budding office romance, but at the same time we delve deeper into her colleagues' private lives, because Cliff mistakenly gives her administrative access to all office correspondence, and boy, does she use this!

Jolene tries to take advantage of all this knowledge to secure her job and, having read what they all think of her, make the others like her more, but after initial success, it dramatically backfires. Just when her life implodes, she realises she does have friends, and family that love her, including the neglected neighbour kid, Miley, who I would have liked to have a bigger slice of the story.

I loved this so much. Jolene is at times unlikeable but I emphasized with her, though also her colleagues who are all dealing with things in their private life that they try to hide at work. This is a very accomplished debut novel, brimming over with heart and understanding for flawed characters and giving them all development journeys (except maybe Gregory who will always remain offensive!). If you've ever worked in an office with passive aggressive coworkers and an undermining boss who calls you all a family whilst happily slashing the budget and firing staff, you will relate SO hard.

I can't wait to see what the author writes next!

4.5 stars

I definitely didn’t think I’d be crying at I Hope This Finds You Well. Crying with laughter sure but after Jolene sucked me into her life I couldn’t help but feel ✨everything✨Come for the beautiful cover + stay for the office drama!

Thank you HarperCollins UK + NetGalley for the chance to read this before it’s published on 23rd May 2024.

Oh yes, this novel DOES find me well! As someone who has worked in an office for nearly 14 years so much of this resonated with me - the colleague who gives you the side-eye when you arrive for work 5 minutes late, the colleague who brings in something to reheat for lunch in the microwave and INSISTS on eating it at their desk, the colleague who clearly doesn't remember who you are every time you join a meeting... The passive-aggressive colleague who puts 'polite notices' up in the staff kitchen! The one who never refills the printer! Oh, I could go on!

Anyway, Natalie Sue has conjured up a workplace in Supershops that many of us can relate to and all the characters that we may encounter. I really liked the protagonist, Jolene. Following a mishap involving an email, Jolene is put on a HR training programme to improve her relationships with colleagues. Her emails are to be monitored until she passes this course, however following the necessary update to her software she realises she can read ALL the emails and instant messages sent on the company system between her colleagues - what will she do with this new found knowledge...?

I appreciated the unfolding narrative of how Jolene's life and past experiences have affected her so we get to understand why she is always pushing people away. Jolene is anxious and clearly traumatised following an event in her adolescence involving her best friend - in this respect Jolene/I Hope This Finds You Well gave off Emily Austin vibes (in a good way!).

I <loved> Cliff! He is going to be making his way to top position as many reader's book boyfriends, I can tell! He was so sweet, funny, had great chemistry with Jolene which felt so believable as their relationship started to deepen, and empathetic but with enough backbone to stand up for himself.

I loved how we got to see into the personal lives of Jolene's co-workers and could appreciate the motivations behind their behaviour. I thought it echoed Jolene's growth through the novel perfectly.

A fantastically fun read which will appeal to anyone who has ever had to sit through a mandatory HR training exercise, or fans of The Other Black Girl, Careering, and The Devil Wears Prada.