The Cleaner
A Novel
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3.8 • 5 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
“Welcome to the office building at night, an eerie ship helmed by one woman desperate for connection.” —Julia Fine, author of Maddalena and the Dark
Every night, she cleans. On the fourth floor of an unnamed office in an unnamed city, the night cleaner comes and does what she does best—sorts out the messes of the daytime employees. None of them know her, but she knows everything about them: Sad Intern’s dreams to get promoted, Résumé Woman’s nasty flight-risk behavior, Mr. Buff’s secret smoking habit (not very conducive to his fitness journey).
She’s the office mastermind, the one everyone needs, and no one even knows she exists. And tonight, while scrolling through your emails, she’ll discover the secret you’ve been hiding—the one that will put everyone’s job at risk.
After all, protecting the employees is her responsibility: whether it’s from rats and window smudges or from the sinister CEO who may be driving the company into ruin. And you’re about to find out that, sometimes, your most powerful enemy is the one you don’t even see.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wells turns the office novel on its head in their sly and satirical debut. Here, the nine-to-five workers are largely absent, their personalities inferred or imagined by the novel's unnamed narrator, who cleans the office building after hours. At first, the nicknames she coins for the daytime employees (Mr. Buff, Yarn Guy, Sad Intern) seem harmlessly whimsical, a creative means of alleviating the drudgery of her job. Soon, however, it becomes clear that the narrator's involvement goes far beyond emptying the trash and picking up used tea bags: "My actual job is to take care of everyone. They need so much help." She intervenes in the lives of those she admires by deleting appointments to make space for self-care. For those she disapproves of—including the company's morally bankrupt CEO—she exposes their secrets. The narrator's desire to be indispensable rather than invisible drives the narrative, which shifts into high gear as her meddling grows increasingly unsettling and her delusions more off-kilter. Wells is a keen observer of the mundane indignities and petty dramas of office life. Rarely has cubicle culture been depicted in such griminess or with such glee. Correction: An earlier version of this review used the wrong pronoun to refer to the author.
Customer Reviews
Just …. Not sure
Sooooooooooo I’m ….. I’m really just not sure