The Beautiful Bureaucrat

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2015

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY TIME OUT, BUSTLE, THE ATLANTIC, ELECTRIC LITERATURE, KOBO, KIRKUS AND MORE

NAMED A MUST READ OF THE SUMMER BY THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE, LOS ANGELES TIMES, BUSTLE, THE HUFFINGTON POST, BUZZFEED, HELLOGIGGLES AND MORE

Part modern fairytale, part existentialist thriller, this is a breathtaking joyride of a novel for the summer.

If the job market hadn't been so bleak during that long, humid summer, Josephine might have been discouraged from taking the administrative position in a windowless building in a remote part of town.

As the days inch by and the files stack up, Josephine feels increasingly anxious in her surroundings - the drone of keyboards echoes eerily down the long halls, her boss has terrible breath, and there are cockroaches in the bath of her sub-let. When one evening her husband Joseph disappears and then returns, offering no explanation as to his whereabouts, her creeping unease shifts decidedly to dread.

Both chilling and poignant, this novel asks the biggest questions about marriage and fidelity, birth and death. Helen Phillips twists the world we know and shows it back to us full of meaning and wonder - luminous and new.

'Chilling... the perfect summer page-turner'

Chicago Tribune

'Riveting... thrillerlike... Ultimately, The Beautiful Bureaucrat succeeds because it isn't afraid to ask the deepest questions'

The New York Times Book Review

'Kafka would love The Beautiful Bureaucrat... It's a surprising revelation of a book from an uncompromising author as unique as she is talented'

NPR

'A joyride... a very weird, very beautiful, very honest book about the surreal business of working in a city, living in a fertile and dying body, and loving another mortal'

Slate

'Unusual... deeply interesting... irresistible... Mrs. Phillips has a wickedly funny eye, a fine sense of pacing, a smooth, winning writing style and a great gift for a telling detail'

New York Times

'Equal parts mystery, thriller, and existential inquiry... The Beautiful Bureaucrat asks uneasy questions about work and life, love and power, and where the whole enterprise of one's own small life is swiftly headed'

The New Republic

'Part dystopian fantasy, part thriller, part giddy literary-nerd wordplay, Helen Phillips' The Beautiful Bureaucrat is both a page-turner and a novel rich in evocative, starkly philosophical language... eerie, stomach-dropping... this novel ultimately proves both clever and impossible to put down'

L.A. Times

'A bewitching parable'

Vanity Fair

'An addictive, uncanny experience... Her prose is exact, at once ominous and droll, and her pacing is perfect. As she probes the mysteries of marriage and mortality, choice and chance, freedom and fate, her pages command close focus - and fly by very fast'

The Atlantic

'Mesmerizing'

Elle

'Uncanny and Kafkaesque... By turns, the novel is goofily funny, creepy and unsettling, life-affirming and sweet, deeply thoughtful and pointedly critical of modern workplace culture... A strange, yet unsettlingly resonant, fable that melds mystery, sci-fi, romance and satire to chillingly skewer the modern workplace yet somehow leave us reaffirmed in our humanity'

The Huffington Post

'Told with the light touch of a Calvino and the warm heart of a Saramago, this brief fable-novel is funny, sad, scary, and beautiful. I love it'

Ursula K. Le Guin

'A satisfying parable of love and life, death and birth, and the travails of transposed numbers. The Beautiful Bureaucrat reads like a thriller'

Joshua Ferris

'A thrillingly original debut, formally inventive and emotionally complex. Helen Phillips is one of the most exciting young writers working today, and I envy those who get to discover her work here for the first time'

Jenny Offill

'The Beautiful Bureaucrat has the compulsive quality of a mystery and the furious urgency of a fever dream. I picked it up and read it everywhere: on the subway, over breakfast, in bed when I should have been sleeping, at work when I should have been working. It will coax you into its world with the crystalline precision of its prose, so full of heart and strangeness it might even crawl into your own dreams and find you there'

Leslie Jamison

'In the bleak hallways of bureaucracy, Helen Phillips explores what it means to make a life one's own. The Beautiful Bureaucrat is a page-turning mystery, a love story and a revelation'

Ramona Ausubel