Recognition and Praise

A NEW YORK TIMES Book Review Editors' Choice

A VOGUE, VULTURE, ELLE, NEW YORKER and ECONOMIST Best Book of the Year

A TIME Must-Read Book of 2024

Filled with an exceptional cast of characters and written with a delicious acid-drop humour

i Paper, Best Paperbacks Out in 2025

About the Book

Help Wanted is like a great nineteenth-century novel about now, at once an effervescent workplace comedy and an exploration of the psychic toll exacted by the labour market.

Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot, says, "Help Wanted held me from its first page. Waldman transmits, through narrative tension and beautifully rendered heartbreak, the exact way that capitalism turned on the very lives it was there to boost and instead corroded."

Taffy Brodesser-Akner, author of The Long Island Compromise, describes it as "Poignant, funny, stealthily ambitious" and notes, "Eliot-like ... . It is simultaneously a joke, a homage, and a provocation for our unequal age. Help Wanted washes labour in a stately, almost Steinbeckian light, emphasizing its difficulty but also its dignity"

The New Yorker calls it "Tightly plotted, slyly caustic and often very funny".

Plot Summary

When the store manager at an upstate New York superstore announces he's leaving, the motley crew members of Team Movement take the news surprisingly well. Overworked and exhausted, they spend their early morning shifts scheming about their jobs and their futures. Now is their only chance to get their hated line manager Meredith promoted up and away from them. And then one of them can replace her - but who will it be?