One of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of the Summer A Best Book of the Year in Vogue , Vulture , Elle , and Economist A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice “Poignant, funny, stealthily ambitious.” ―Michelle Goldberg, New York Times From the best-selling author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. comes a funny, eye-opening tale of work in contemporary America. Every day at 3:55 a.m., members of Team Movement clock in for their shift at big-box store Town Square in a small upstate New York town. Under the eyes of a self-absorbed and barely competent boss, they empty the day’s truck of merchandise, stock the shelves, and scatter before the store opens and customers arrive. Their lives follow a familiar if grueling routine, but their real problem is that Town Square doesn’t schedule them for enough hours―most of them are barely getting by, even while working second or third jobs. When store manager Big Will announces he is leaving, the members of Movement spot an opportunity. If they play their cards right, one of them just might land a management job, with all the stability and possibility for advancement that that implies. The members of Team Movement―including a comedy-obsessed oddball who acts half his age, a young woman clinging on to her “cool kid” status from high school, and a college football hopeful trying to find a new path―band together to set a just-so-crazy-it-might-work plot in motion. Adelle Waldman’s debut novel was a breakout sensation, lauded by the Los Angeles Times as an “exacting character study” with “excellent and witty prose” and described as “incisive and very funny” by the Economist and “brilliant” by both NPR’s Fresh Air and the Washington Post . In her long-awaited follow-up, Waldman brings her unparalleled wit and astute social observation to the world of modern, low-wage work. A humane and darkly comic workplace caper that shines a light on the odds low-wage workers are up against in today’s economy, Help Wanted is a funny, moving tale of ordinary people trying to make a living. "Perhaps the most impressive thing about Help Wanted is that Waldman manages, in telling her small story, to describe not just the American economic prison but the global one. So: both a novel of manners and a systems novel, a book that shows us, perhaps, how intimately linked these apparently disparate genres were all along. It’s a funny novel, as well as deeply humane and very angry.… [I]t also reads, with a frightening lack of irony, as a message from America itself. Help wanted. The question is, who’s listening?" ― Kevin Power, Guardian "Waldman refreshes the social novel’s insistence on the necessity of seeing past the conventional or obvious to a more fine-grained yet elusive reality.… Help Wanted washes labor in a stately, almost Steinbeckian light, emphasizing its difficulty but also its dignity." ― Katy Waldman, The New Yorker "How did the writer of a novel that precisely described the parties and bedrooms of literary Brooklyn transform into the writer of Help Wanted , a deeply political yet highly readable story about the lives of low-wage workers? The answer might be that the novels have more in common than is readily apparent, despite their very different settings; both of them capture a world and a moment in time in a way that’s become unstylish in recent history and has a closer affinity with the works of George Eliot and Jane Austen than most novels published today." ― Emily Gould, New York Magazine "Sociologically astute, deeply humane, and cleverly plotted." ― Heller McAlpin, Christian Science Monitor "Could not be more fascinating or more fun." ― People "Great workplace novels are few and far between…and great workplace novels that deal with social and economic class in our country are even rarer. However, Waldman adds a rare entry to the workplace canon with this wise, funny story of an upstate New York big-box store." ― Bethanne Patrick, Los Angeles Times "Adelle Waldman applies her sharp sense for relational drama and dark comedy to the retail work space.… Help Wanted is structured around the collective, depicting the toll of capitalism on low-wage workers.… Waldman is skilled at building momentum and tension through intricacies of plot. The book shines whenever the group is together, concocting plans to better their working conditions, resisting and influencing one another in search of a shared sense of hope." ― Alexandra Chang, New York Times Book Review " Help Wanted is a tragedy of circumstance.… As ever, Waldman is a sharp observer of the world, a writer whose attention to particulars only sharpens the big picture." ― Jordan Kisner, Atlantic "Graced with the psychological acuity that distinguished its predecessor." ― Maureen Corrigan, NPR "The dramatic irony instills this comic novel’s small-time escapades with a potent and lingering feeling of injustice." ― Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal "A s