"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.