This is without a doubt the weirdest book I’ve read this year so far, and one I definitely need to sit with for a bit. If you enjoyed Severance and like reading things that really require you to think, this is the book for you. It’s so twisty and I’m definitely going to go back and re-read certain parts again. Thank you to the publisher for the ARC.

Ben Pester’s The Expansion Project (out in Aug 2025) is an unnerving novel that opens with a deceptively ordinary scenario, “Bring Your Daughter to Work Day”, and proceeds to spiral into an almost-dystopian tale.

Tom Crowley, a mid-level employee, is preparing to take his daughter Hen to the office. There’s a quiet menace in this normalcy, and the smallest frictions, including Crowley’s frustration with Hen over trivialities, are signposts pointing toward deeper disorientation.

Once at the office, events take a subtly absurd turn. No one else seems to remember or acknowledge Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, not even colleagues with children who would typically participate. Then Hen disappears. Crowley is convinced she’s lost somewhere in the building. But CCTV tells another story: she was never there. The footage shows Crowley arriving alone.

At the centre of it all, the Capmeadow Expansion Project, an ambitious corporate redevelopment effort, grows increasingly uncanny, physically expanding in an inexplicable manner and swallowing not just landscapes but also the identities, homes, and temporal anchors of those who work within. Then it seems the days grow into years and reality blurs completely.

What makes The Expansion Project particularly intriguing is its deliberate ambiguity. The narrative twists and turns, unfolding in a way that keeps the reader uncertain about what's real and what's not.

Pester masterfully cultivates a sense of creeping disquiet throughout the novel. In many ways, this offbeat novel serves as a surreal and sinister critique of modern corporate culture pushed to its most nightmarish limits. Really enjoyed it!

I thank #NetGalley and Granta for the e-ARC.

The blurb for this book drew me to it, but in some ways it didn’t live up to my expectations — and in other ways, it surpassed them. That may sound contradictory and confusing, but it feels accurate.

The story starts with a man, Tom, taking his daughter to work for Bring Your Daughter to Work Day. But then she disappears… or maybe she was never there? At first, it seems like he’s having a breakdown, but as more is revealed, it becomes clear that not everything is as it seems — and it gets harder for both the reader and the characters to tell what’s real and what’s not.

That surreal atmosphere is what stood out for me. Buildings appear out of nowhere, and characters seem to struggle with their memories. It reminded me a lot of Severance — that strange corporate world where the purpose of the work is mysterious and unsettling.

However, while I really enjoyed the style, by the second half of the book I found myself wanting answers and explanations that never came. I felt unsatisfied by the end. It was a bit like one of those TV shows that teases you with mystery but ultimately doesn’t deliver a satisfying conclusion.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC.

In the mood for Severance.
Have you taken your kid to work with you?
Think again, maybe you haven’t.
What a fun and thrilling satire.

Sims meets A Thousand Plateaus, that's how my brain decided to make sense of what it has read. Jokes aside, how else can we understand the immanence of capitalism that erases the boundaries between public and private, labor and leisure, company and worker? As Deleuze and Guattari demonstrate in the chapter "7000 B.C.: Apparatus of Capture," the axiomatics of capitalism circumscribe the social sphere—and, I would add, the more-than-human sphere as well. The axioms of addition/subtraction and saturation are especially pertinent. I can't help but quote what they wrote:

Capitalism is indeed an axiomatic, because it has no laws but immanent ones. It would like for us to believe that it confronts the limits of the Universe, the extreme limit of resources and energy. But all it confronts are its own limits (the periodic depreciation of existing capital); all it repels or displaces are its own limits (the formation of new capital, in new industries with a high profit rate). This is the history of oil and nuclear power. And it does both at once: capitalism confronts its own limits and simultaneously displaces them, setting them down again farther along (ATP, 463).

Indeed, The Expansion Project materializes the displacement of the limits of the capital. Capmeadow literally expands into the space by producing itself, thereby deterritorializing its own limits. The deterritorialization (or decoding) of relatively stable things, such as kinship relations and workplace stability, makes all the characters displaced, acting out, and ontologically unstable. They might be "here" or "elsewhere"; it matters little, as long as it is all on a single plane of immanence that pushes further and further into the inside/outside. Genius novel.

The Expansion Project leads with a story about a man who takes his child to work on a Bring Your Daughter To Work Day. Or maybe he doesn’t do that after all - after a frantic search, he is shown CCTV evidence that she wasn’t with him on the commute, and she turns up safe and sound at school just like a regular school day. Or maybe she doesn’t - he is convinced that his daughter is trapped somewhere at work. A workplace which keeps expanding, growing as an organic behemoth.

From there, the novel gets even more surreal, with muddled timelines and fragmented competing narratives. Together they hold a fractured mirror to corporate enterprise.

I don’t quite know how I feel about this book. But it was certainly subtly unsettling, which is always an important mark for a satire. It’s something that will stay with you after you have finished reading. I can’t remember a time before Capmeadow.

I'm just not sure about this - perhaps too experimental for me to grasp. Dystopian view of big corporations but just a bit too much of a metaphor rather than a clear narrative.

What an interesting book!
Capmeadow Business Park is rapidly expanding.
At a "bring your daughter to work" day employee Tom Crowley loses his daughter.
After a thorough search, she still can't be found.
It transpires she was never there though
Tom though can't reconcile this with his memories, so continues the search through the maze of corridors of the ever expanding Capmeadow.

If you are enjoying Severance, then this book could be for you
A cross between a mystery, a dystopia and a critique of work-life balance and family life.
I found the book very enjoyable to read, but it will definitely need a re-read to understand it more

A disorienting, unsettling descent into a near-future corporate dystopia that has lingered in my thoughts long after turning the final page. If you're a fan of the Apple TV series Severance, with its sterile corridors and unnerving dissection of work-life balance, this book will feel hauntingly familiar, yet distinctly its own brand of bizarre.
The Expansion Project plunges the reader into a world that is unnervingly close to our own, yet subtly and profoundly wrong. I couldn't work out where it was set so I had this evolving image - first I thought it was Japan, then America, then UK.

The narrative is intentionally bewildering. I spent a significant portion of the book with a creeping sense of unease, unsure of what was real and what was a symptom of the characters' unravelling sanity. The plot, as much as it can be pinned down, centres on the ever-expanding and logic-defying Capmeadow Business Park, a place where the laws of physics and reason seem to be optional. The protagonist, a mid-level employee, is already adrift in this corporate malaise when his daughter vanishes during a "bring your daughter to work day."

Did I enjoy it? I'm still not entirely sure. It was a challenging, often frustrating read that offered no easy answers. But that, I believe, is precisely the point. The Expansion Project is a commentary on the dehumanising nature of corporate ambition and the quiet horror of losing oneself within the machine. It will undoubtedly haunt your thoughts long after you've finished.

"The new Capmeadow learns what you want for lunch, that's what we were saying. No - not what you want - what you will want. I had that argument with him too. The more I think about him, the more I feel like he was the one who started all this. I know you won't accept that anything is happening, but of course it is, and of course it can't be all his fault, but I blame him. I'd like to kill him. I'd like to kill him.

[A voice: OK. Is there another way you can say how you feel, do you think? With new words, perhaps. We can't continue here if you're talking about killing people. I'll have to stop the meeting. Can you try?]

I'll try. OK. I'll try."

Ben Pester's Am I in the Right Place? longlisted for the Edge Hill Prize was a collection of 11 wonderfully off-kilter short stories (typically c20 pages). Several centre around office life, but with elements of the bizarre and magical mixed in with the mundane. His stories have also featured in Granta, The London Magazine, TANK, Hotel, Five Dials, in addition to at least two anthologies I've read, Best British Short Stories 2022 from Salt Publishing and Duets from Scratch Books.

The Expansion Project applies a similarly offbeat approach and office setting but at novel length. It begins:

"Tom Crowley faces challenges with scheduling

The morning of Bring Your Daughter to Work Day began for me in silence. The hall sagged with the outlines of our coats, the family coats on the family coat rack, blocking the light from the front door."

And the opening is relatively conventional - Crowley takes his 8yo daughter to the office, rather than to school, although from waking her comments that "the whole day was at the wrong angle somehow" and his exasparation with his daughter, Hen, for relatively mundane things betrays his inner anxiety:

"With Hen, there had been no such problems with other kids. She seemed invincible. There was nobody who didn't know her, nobody who had a pet she didn't know the name of. I was jealous of her recall for names and faces, her enthusiasm for other people's lives. She seemed able to devour them like books. And yet, I could never shake the feeling that some of my awkwardness had been passed on to her. Some of this incapacity I have, like anger, and failure, always there beneath the surface. Does everyone have that? When I looked at her I'd worry that they don't, and that I'm not normal, and I have passed on this abnormality to her."

On eventual arrival at the office no one else seems to know it is Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, not even his colleague Alex, with a 6 or 7yo daughter, who joins in all such activities: "he would be certain to bring her, I felt sure. If there's an extra-work activity, Alex Wood is there, up to his elbows in banter, dressed as a Christmas elf, ready to win the charity egg-and-spoon race."

But things take an odder turn when Hen disappears, and, then even more oddly, although Tom remains convinced she is lost in the office somewhere, she turns out to have gone to school all along, CCTV footage from the station and the office showing Tom travelled and arrived alone.

From then on the novel takes a more surreal turn. What we are reading turns out to be the records of an archivist, documenting the history of the Capmeadow Expansion Project, including interview by a Liaison Officer with some of those involved. And what starts out as more of an conventional takeover by a conglomorate turns into something rather more, the business park literally expanding in a living organic form into the surrounding area, with buildings formed organically, and with employees whose home and work lives become literally blurred, and with timelines shifting.

A novel that needs to be read rather than summarised - one I'd love to see on the Goldsmiths Prize.

Tom took his daughter to work.
Tom didn't take his daughter to work.
Both are true and yet neither is true and honestly you're best going into this knowing nothing more. This book grabbed my curiosity by throat and didn't let up until I finished it. The characters are varied, unique and incredibly sharply written and the perfectly balanced panic and odd detachment that seep in from page 1 create a real sense of unease. This is the kind of book that's meant to be read in a group and discussed after each chapter. At any given moment I didn't know if I was bracing for the end of the world or the arrival of a Utopian resolution fitting of Black Mirror. In a world where Severance sets the bar for office based thrillers, The Expansion Project carves out its own unique corner and really grows into something that I feel will sit with me for days.