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Chris Harley wins December's Find-Book review competition for his review of Then We Came to the End: A Novel by Joshua Ferris
04 January 2012
Thank you to everyone who found some time during the Christmas festivities to write a book review and send it in to Find-Book's review competition. Last month's winner has now been chosen and we are pleased to be able to tell you that Chris Harley's review of Then we Came to the End: A Novel by Joshua Ferris is the one that has been chosen this time.
Chris will be receiving his prize – a very generous £50 Amazon voucher – very soon. Chris's review can be read in full below for you all to enjoy. Chris gave this particular book a rating of 5 stars so you never know his review may even tempt you to buy it for yourself.
We are already taking entries for January's competition so if you have been taking advantage of days off over Christmas to catch up on your reading, or if you have been lucky enough to have received some books as gifts – please do send in your reviews or even just a few lines to let everyone know what you thought of your books. Remember we are giving away another £50 Amazon voucher this month and if you win it you can use it to buy anything you want.
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The competition is really easy to enter. Simply select the title of the book you want to review, click on the write review button and off you go, start typing your literary thoughts. Our rules are very straightforward – most importantly please don't use offensive language and also we won't accept reviews which appear on other sites – they must be completely unique. If you would like to see some examples of what other people have sent in then why not read some past reviews. Also why not have a look at some of the prize-winning reviews from the last few months then you can see the sort of thing that impresses our judge. Any book that appears on our site from any genre can be reviewed for the competition. Your review can be of a book you loved to read and one that you wish to share with others or it can be of a book you have ruefully consigned to the bin and want to warn others not to waste money on. All reviews are welcome and are gratefully received! Good Luck to you all.
Then We Came to the End: A Novel (by Joshua Ferris) reviewed by Chris Harley
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Joshua Ferris' novel, Then We Came To The End, is by far one of the most interesting, riveting, and innovative novels that I've read in a very, very long time. It was one of a number of books I opened on Christmas morning, and I have already read my way through it two days later; it is almost impossible to put it down. From the very start of the novel, it is utterly captivating.
What is immediately striking is Ferris' narration. Rather than the usual third-person or first-person-singular narrator - 'He' or 'I' - we are instead presented with the first-person-plural for the vast majority of the novel - 'we'. This use of 'we' as the narrator instantly draws the reader into the text, welcoming us as an integral part of the book, warming us to the characters and the somewhat tragic events that befall them.
Ferris' novel is set during the cusp of the bursting bubble of the dot-com era in an advertising agency that is in the middle of down-sizing, with all of its lower employees forever concerned with the number of lay-offs that they are witness to on a seemingly day-to-day basis. The idea that 'tragedy' could be used to describe their situation may at first seem a little out of place, since they are in fact fairly wealthy, middle-class, white-collar workers. But through no fault of their own, they find themselves one by one diminishing in size at a rapid rate.
The book perfectly recalls the end of the 20th Century and the beginning of the 21st, set in a world facing a recession not dissimilar to the one in which we have just found ourselves, making the novel even more of a relevant read in our current economic climate. It is a world in which the workers can find little or nothing to remain hopeful, and that in itself reads like a tragedy.
The simultaneous comedy that is infused throughout the novel, however, is absolutely perfect. It is not often that you can read a book that can lift your spirits with laughter and make you sympathise with the characters' plight at the same time, but Ferris clearly proves himself as an incredibly talented writer in his ability to do just that. We find ourselves laughing out loud whilst reading of their little exploits and pranks that they carry out amongst each other through the course of the workdays, and can't help but recall similar moments in our own office lives - a stolen office chair here, rumours about other employees whispered there.
The duality of comedy/tragedy builds throughout the course of the novel to its critical climax that perfectly combines both within a disgruntled ex-employee. It is a novel only too relevant to us reading it today, and one that I whole-heartedly recommend to you to read as soon as possible. It makes you laugh, it makes you reflect - both on your own life and on the greater aspects of life itself - and it makes you utterly reluctant to stop reading it for even a moment, so desperate are you to discover what will come next. And really, that is all we can ask of a novel.
Then We Came To The End is an absolutely triumphant debut novel from Ferris, which very much deservedly won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for the Best First Novel, and I am already looking forward to reading his second book, The Unnamed, which came out last year. If it is anything like his first, it will be a true stroke of genius.
What is immediately striking is Ferris' narration. Rather than the usual third-person or first-person-singular narrator - 'He' or 'I' - we are instead presented with the first-person-plural for the vast majority of the novel - 'we'. This use of 'we' as the narrator instantly draws the reader into the text, welcoming us as an integral part of the book, warming us to the characters and the somewhat tragic events that befall them.
Ferris' novel is set during the cusp of the bursting bubble of the dot-com era in an advertising agency that is in the middle of down-sizing, with all of its lower employees forever concerned with the number of lay-offs that they are witness to on a seemingly day-to-day basis. The idea that 'tragedy' could be used to describe their situation may at first seem a little out of place, since they are in fact fairly wealthy, middle-class, white-collar workers. But through no fault of their own, they find themselves one by one diminishing in size at a rapid rate.
The book perfectly recalls the end of the 20th Century and the beginning of the 21st, set in a world facing a recession not dissimilar to the one in which we have just found ourselves, making the novel even more of a relevant read in our current economic climate. It is a world in which the workers can find little or nothing to remain hopeful, and that in itself reads like a tragedy.
The simultaneous comedy that is infused throughout the novel, however, is absolutely perfect. It is not often that you can read a book that can lift your spirits with laughter and make you sympathise with the characters' plight at the same time, but Ferris clearly proves himself as an incredibly talented writer in his ability to do just that. We find ourselves laughing out loud whilst reading of their little exploits and pranks that they carry out amongst each other through the course of the workdays, and can't help but recall similar moments in our own office lives - a stolen office chair here, rumours about other employees whispered there.
The duality of comedy/tragedy builds throughout the course of the novel to its critical climax that perfectly combines both within a disgruntled ex-employee. It is a novel only too relevant to us reading it today, and one that I whole-heartedly recommend to you to read as soon as possible. It makes you laugh, it makes you reflect - both on your own life and on the greater aspects of life itself - and it makes you utterly reluctant to stop reading it for even a moment, so desperate are you to discover what will come next. And really, that is all we can ask of a novel.
Then We Came To The End is an absolutely triumphant debut novel from Ferris, which very much deservedly won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for the Best First Novel, and I am already looking forward to reading his second book, The Unnamed, which came out last year. If it is anything like his first, it will be a true stroke of genius.
A selection of books reviewed recently in Find-Book's review competition
