Ben Pester's debut novel, The Expansion Project explores the absurd rituals and banalities of modern office work.

It's just another day in the office for Tom Crowley except its 'Bring your daughter into work' day and he has his daughter commuting with him and being signed through security. Showing her his desk and meeting the people he works with he starts to realise that no one else has come with their daughters. Then his daughter disappears... 

Questions start to be asked - did the daughter ever come into the office, has Ben ever left the campus since her disappearance. The Expansion Project delves into the blurring of boundaries between work and life, and the way work can dissolve life outside of work with the offerings of canteens, fitness suites, clubs and even accommodation. You live to work; you work to live. The Expansion Project highlights the way late-capitalist corporations have a tight grip on shaping society, and the power of work has over people's lives.

A search begins around the building and the ever-expanding scope of Capmeadow business park. Nothing seems to stay the same for very long and people seem to forget what has just happened. Buildings are constantly moving and there's a fog sweeping across the business park. No one seems to know what is happening but are accepting of this state of affairs. Ben Pester taps into the dread of the workplace, ever evolving changes from a vague manager and priorities change. This book perfectly captures the constant confusion and bunny hopping of priorities as the employees of Capmeadow work around the clock but never know what is really happening around them.


There is no definite ending which sums up the whole of the novel, and the way the Capmeadow expansion project has no end date and will continue long after employees leave or even long after the reader stops reading the book. I can see The Expansion project being a book that divides opinion but also becoming a cult favourite. I would definitely read more by Ben Pester, and I have already his short story collection.

This really wasn't my thing. It starts off rather well, focusing on one father's journey into work for 'Bring Your Daughter to Work' day. I enjoyed the acerbic prose and precise descriptions of the horror-inducing joys of parenthood. The linear story of this one father was mixed in with additional in-universe materials about the Expansion Project of his company, hinting on the Severance-like Kafkaesque corporate satire to come. The linear plot sort of gained traction by midway through the book, creating a mystery, but it gets drowned out by the additional materials, such as interviews with other employees. I think my main issue was that by the halfway point it was not very clear what exactly is supposed to be at the heart of the satire, what was the author getting at. According to other reviews, the book has a more surrealist feel, rather than delivers a razor-sharp and clear critique of anything in particular, and the surrealism and the loss of steam of the linear storytelling narration failed to keep me engaged.

Magnus Mills – but for white collar workers – with an at times surreal satire of the world of work, but here for office workers (in particular a Training Design writer in an firm of never specified purpose in an all encompassing business park) rather than the bus drivers/fencers/van drivers etc of Mills’s work.

The book begins with Tom Crowley taking his precocious eight year old daughter Hen into work by train – at the Capemeadow Park – for Bring Your Daughter To Work Day. But he seems to be the only person who thinks it is that day and further Hen goes missing. To add to the confusion no one else seems to remember him having a daughter with him – and the CCTV footage seems to confirm that, as does the fact that Hen appears to be safely at school. But Tom is nevertheless unsure what is happening and increasingly adrift and unmoored and very deliberately Pester engenders the same sensation in the reader.

Interspersed with Tom’s story we also learn of the Capmeadow Expansion Project – the business park increasingly becoming all encompassing in both facilities and in the lives of the workers there; we have a lengthy section written by an AV Technician, another by a receptionist, interviews by a lisaion officer seemingly investigating various incidents around Tom, and find a framing device whereby the book is it seems being compiled (its deliberately not clear when or why) by an archivist who also starts to enter the narrative directly.

It all makes for an original and intriguing read – and I can see the novel as a Goldsmith Prize contender.

If I had a criticism, it is that the conceit of the Park and its Expansion seems to me to date more to the days of the Silicon Valley boom where internet firms increasingly seemed to turn their workplace campuses into places where their workforces never seemed to leave. Post pandemic most firms are struggling to get their workforce to even attend the office (or have given up struggling) – although there is a section where Tom takes a workcall/message chat on his home stairs for hours while his family life literally bypasses him, and that did seem to better fit the different blurring of home/work which now pertains.

My thanks to Granta for an ARC via NetGalley

The Capmeadow Expansion Project is in full swing. When Tom Crowley brings his daughter to the office for ‘bring your daughter to work day’ and loses her, he raises the alarm and his colleagues hurry to help him find her. But then, it turns out that she was never there. She was at school all along, safe and secure. Tom cannot accept that she isn’t a Capmeadow, and continues to search for her in his ever-expanding workplace. Because Capmeadow keeps growing, and employees are being affected in unexpected ways.

To be honest, the less you know about this book, the better. It’s mind-bending, confusing and surreal, and reminded me a lot of Vivarium (the horror movie in which a young couple get trapped in an endless suburban neighbourhood). The idea of an ever-changing, ever-expanding workplace that confines its employees is, frankly, terrifying and so well done in this book. I spent a large portion of the time not totally understanding what was going on, but that didn’t take anything away from my enjoyment while reading this book.

The concept and Capmeadow itself are the shining stars of this story, but I also really enjoyed the warped mystery around Tom and what happened to his daughter: Was she ever there? Was she not? How can Tom find her if she’s not missing?

Just a day at work, what can go wrong?
Everything about this book sounded like exactly what I like. A weird workplace, some weird events, expansion project, Severence vibes? I really liked the premise of this book and complete impossibility to categorize the style of it. It started as fiction, just a weird day with some unusual happenings that are easy to write off as, well, mental health stuff? But quite quickly it gets weird in the sci-fi direction but absolutely unlike what sci-fi usually does, it’s going much more into the uncanny valley territory. The book also quickly stops following just the main character, Tom, and presents a bunch of other perspectives from workers all around the company in the form of interviews as well as descriptions of the events from the perspective of an observer, cctv style. The narrative seems to really follow the expansion project itself, almost like a character, experienced by the workers. I really liked how bizarre it got, it kept getting more and more strange but it also meant that I felt like I wasn’t able to fully understand what was going on. As soon as I finished, I thought that I maybe wasn’t focused enough and second reading would clear things up but I wasn’t sure I wanted to invest the time again. In the end I think this book was doing a lot of interesting things but didn’t hold any particular intellectual value to justify needing multiple reads just to understand what it was trying to convey. On the other hand, I do love books that are so impossible to place, that stand out among all the other reads but they do need some anchor, something truly memorable and The Expansion Project was lacking it.

This book surprises with a lot of interesting narrative styles but seems to lack focus. In parts it felt more like interconnected short stories which were hard to piece together. It does have unique ideas that stand out among other fiction and I’ll be looking forward to this author’s future projects.

Thank you to Granta Publications and NetGalley for the eARC!

Apologies - I did not enjoy this book, was somewhat bored by it, and by the style, so won't leave reviews.

Fans of Ben Pester’s short story collection Am I In The Right Place will feel at home with his debut novel, The Expansion Project, which covers similar themes of isolation, paranoia and corporate nihilism, all rendered in a surreal and dreamlike narrative.

The premise is straightforward: on what he believes to be Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, motivational copywriter Tom Crowley arrives at Capmeadow Business Park with his eight-year-old daughter, Hen. It soon transpires however, that there has been no directive for any employee to bring their children into the office, despite Tom’s insistence on having received an email. It’s not long before Hen disappears, swallowed up in Capmeadow’s vast, ever-expanding maze of corridors, and Tom is left frantically searching for a young girl no one claims to have seen.

There’s a uniquely steady hum of menace beneath the surface of Pester’s prose, a threat that something awful could happen at any moment. The nameless Capmeadow archivists and the almost entirely absent corporate interviewees (who the characters address throughout the book) carry and heighten this unease, establishing a backdrop of unwelcome scrutiny, shattered only occasionally by brief conversational prompts in the interests of gathering employee data.

The business park itself functions as an administrative nightmare, predominantly intent on achieving growth for growth’s sake. As the novel unfolds, Capmeadow becomes a stage not just for bureaucratic absurdity, but for a deeper reflection on what it means to raise a child in a fractured world. Pester’s writing focuses on a particular kind of paternal failure—a failure that is not intended to be harmful but is nonetheless destructive. In his short stories and in The Expansion Project, father figures are presented as erratic, they are in a constant state of emergency, desperately trying to communicate some truth that they feel is valuable to their offspring but doing so in a manner that feels, ultimately, hopeless.

The legacy of parental trauma, with all of its guilt and anxiety, permeates the book. Tom acknowledges his irrational anger as stemming from his own parents' anger, which follows him around “like a mugger” wherever he goes. At one point, he recounts a disturbing story told by his father about birch disease, a condition where bones start to diverge and "sprout like roots" resembling a birch tree in autumn, eventually killing the host. His father calls this inexorable growth “flourishing”, which of course mirrors the apparent flourishing of Capmeadow, but also highlights a generational cycle of unresolved pain: the disease was not real, Tom’s father made it up to frighten his son, which we learn was just one of his many “rotten” actions over the years.

Tom, it turns out, is unable to de-inherit the trauma he has been unwittingly spreading through the many microdecisions made throughout his life, including that of employment. Indeed, unresolved trauma is beneficial to the company, which encourages Tom to suppress the memory of his lost daughter, rather than process it. This leads to a sort of dehumanised existence for the workers of Capmeadow, where memories are mutable and individual identity becomes fluid and unreliable. This is reflected in the narrative, which at times sacrifices clarity for the sake of immersing the reader in the same confusion and instability.

Nonetheless, The Expansion Project is a confident and multifaceted debut. It is an important and timely work that highlights the absurdity of modern life and the strains of what it means to be a good parent in an impossible world. The book stands as a warning that we must be mindful of the fragility of our own agency and the potential for the manipulation of reality in an increasingly exploitative and unreal world.

Wow.

I don't think I'll be able to write a proper review that will do this book justice. It was everything I love in a book: weird, non-linear narrative, flawed characters, mystery. I thought the overall concept was really well executed, and I read non-stop until I finished. I then regretted this because now I feel bereft.

Thank you to NetGalley and Granta for the ARC

It is hard to know where to start with a book like Ben Pester’s The Expansion Project. Possibly the best thing is to consider what it resembles. The Expansion Project is a surreal deconstruction of modern corporate culture that reads a like The Office as written by Franz Kafka by way of Welcome to Nightvale. It is in turns scary, scathing, insightful, achingly sad and compassionate. And despite its complete weirdness does not fail to hit its target.
The book opens with a narrative by a guy called Tom Crowley. Tom talks about the day he took his six-year-old to his office at a place called Capmeadow for ‘bring your daughter to work day’. Even their commute, which involves his daughter wandering away at the train station, is fraught. But worse is when his daughter goes missing at the office. Only it turns out that he never brought his daughter to Capmeadow, that she was at school all along and while he was looking for her was safely at home. That does not stop him continuing to look for her.
It is revealed fairly early on that Tom is telling his story to someone and that a range of stories of people who work at Capmeadow are being captured by someone called The Archivist. Other narrators have similar bizarre experiences particularly as Capmeadow engages in something called the expansion project. It appears this project is the Capmeadow campus literally expanding - adding roads and housing and restaurants and even a museum. Many employees find that the easiest thing to do is just go with the flow and live there in the corporate accommodation. This expansion is accompanied by a strange mist that has different psychological effects on the people who breathe it in. And that is before things get really weird.
As already noted, The Expansion Project is a take down of modern corporate culture – from CEO town halls to video conferences to security passes to the idea of office presence. But it comes at all of these things from a surreal angle so it is barbs are likely to land more squarely for those (and there are plenty of us) who have lived it than those who have not. But either way, The Expansion Project will both enthral and puzzle readers looking for something that takes the familiar and makes it compellingly bizarre

I loved this — an unsettling and uncanny vision of contemporary corporate and capitalist living, the blurring of home and work and the increasingly unstable boundaries between the two. The archival form worked well and had a sense of House of Leaves about it. Really like what Pester has done here.

This was a super anticipated read for me but it fell short of my expectations. I struggled with the first third or so of the book, in which narrator Tom Crowley loses his daughter during a 'Bring Your Daughter to Work Day' at Capmeadow Business Park. I found the novel more compelling when the narrative split to include interjections from the archivist and 'A voice', characters who strangely enough felt more fleshed out and 'real'. It has some touching moments and intriguing ideas amid the commentary on the modern workplace and parenting which kept me going. Ultimately, though, The Expansion Project hasn't left a lasting impression on me.

Thank you to NetGalley and Granta for the e-ARC.

This book was so immersive the entire way! Very intriguing and unique, I’m not giving anything away. The very first moment I saw the cover I got Severance vibes. Obviously it’s not the same, but still captivating. I’ll be buying this book in hard cover when it becomes available

If you liked Severance, get ready to enjoy The Expansion Project by Ben Pester

What starts as a 'bring your daughter to work day’ for a mentally absent but guilt ridden father soon turns into a walking nightmare. Flitting between first person POVs of our protagonist and other people within the company and interspersed with notes from the Archivist, The expansion project plays with reality, time and space making you constantly unsure of what's real. Did Tom bring his daughter to work that day, are you watching a breakdown in real time, is that a slow descent into madness or is something more nefarious going on in this trippy, ever expanding workplace?

You can taste the anxiety of unfinished work and unreplied emails racking up and the never ending obligations of corporate life and the space you need to fit in to. Really encapsulates the ‘always on’ nature of the corporate world that your value is how useful you are to the business and what your ‘current bandwidth’ is.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advance copy of this book.

I do not have a clue what this is about but it is oddly compelling. I feel that understanding it was just beyond my grasp so I will be re-reading the book to see if i get it any more clearly.

It starts in a fairly normal way with a man taking his disobedient brat of a daughter to a Bring Your Daughter to Work day but then everything becomes very strange. At first I thought we were reading about a man having a psychotic episode and that all events were happening inside his head. That might even be the case but we then get contributions from an archivist and A Voice and extracts from transcriptions.

There are tantalising hints throughout that perhaps the daughter was in the office after all and might even be one of the other characters we meet but who knows?

The Capmeadow area/organisation expands like a computer game and is described almost as if it is an organism in itself - this is unsettling but intriguing.

I would recommend this book and I look forward to reading other reviews where readers might well have noticed many things that i have missed.

Capmeadow is expanding, and so does the idea of what a novel could be.

What if the parental guilt of missing your child’s formative years to work commitment was taken to the extreme, and the child actually goes missing? (or does she?)

What if the struggle for work-life balance is futile when there’s no off-switch, and your work not only touches your life but engulfs everything that makes a life.

What if a corporate metrics on growth and expansion extend beyond the boardroom, and is manifested as an organic growth beneath your feet. What if performance tracking becomes round-the-clock surveillance?

Pester stretches these familiar concerns and then some, to their bleak, absurd limits. By turning up the volume, the novel shows just how much has already been lost to the churn of office culture and the system we’ve allowed to shape and trap us.

Inventive, impeccable writing with genuine emotional resonances that by the end of this book, A reader returns to page one & starts over.

At the start of the novel, Tom is getting ready to take his daughter along to Capmeadow Business Park for 'Take Your Daughter to Work Day.' He appears to be an ordinary, anxious family man on a hectic workday morning: "The kitchen was trashed. Looking now like a kind of recreation of an abandoned wartime home you might see in a museum. Like everyone had left the bunker and left all their crap everywhere. There were plates and half-mugs of cold tea... I do actually know how to stay on top of domestic work. I do know. But on that day, I felt alone. The whole day was at the wrong angle somehow."

So far, so relatable. However, the narrative develops with twists, tangents and interruptions which have a surreal and almost science-fiction feel. It is vividly imaginative, experimental and elegantly constructed. I'm left wondering what inspired the story, and am not sure I fully grasped its meaning. There was, nevertheless, a lot to enjoy, and I might revisit it again in the future.

Many thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the advance copy.

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.