Work Nights
-
- $14.99
Publisher Description
**Longlisted for the Center for Fiction 2025 First Novel Prize**
A young queer woman finds herself in a love triangle with an unobtainable intern and a quick-tempered musician in this charming debut that combines Big Swiss with The Devil Wears Prada.
Jane Grabowski hauls herself to her nine to five office job at New York City’s most acclaimed newspaper to sit in stale air under severe florescent lights and mask her rage by sending emails with too many exclamation points.
Luckily, Jane has a reason to keep coming into the office: Madeline, the distractingly beautiful intern. Madeline has never dated a woman and is uncomfortable with labels but with carefully timed lunch breaks and painstakingly crafted texts, Jane works her way into her life. Meanwhile, Jane’s free-spirited artist roommate tries to keep her from falling for a straight girl by dragging Jane to gay bars and queer Shabbat dinners, where she meets the decidedly uncool and morally righteous musician, Addy.
Caught between Addy’s readiness to commit and Madeline’s alluring unpredictability, Jane is pulled down a slippery path of lies and deceit, leading to a plane ticket that threatens to take everything down in one fell swoop.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A lowly media planner pursues friendship and love while trying to stay afloat at her magazine job in Peplin's witty and emotionally raw debut. Twenty-something narrator Jane Grabowski can't tell whether she's been promoted or sidelined when she's assigned to work under fashion editor Bekah Rake, a woman whose "glamorous boredom" reminds Jane of Cher from Clueless. Mainly, Jane lusts for department intern Madeline Navarro, who keeps sending her mixed signals. If the situationship between Jane and Madeline weren't messy enough, musician and serial monogamist Addy enters the picture and makes Jane even more conflicted about what she truly wants. While she basks in Addy's comparatively effusive attention, she also longs for the excitement she felt with Madeline. Peplin keeps readers rooting for Jane to find love, but more indelible than the romance plot is the depiction of the bond between Jane and her colleagues, who call themselves the Stepford Planners and dish about their cutthroat office ("Getting fired was like dying except worse because nobody gave you a gravestone," Jane reflects after Bekahe gets the axe). Devotees of The Devil Wears Prada will find much to love.
