The Expansion Project

A tour de force in surrealist comedy... The Expansion ­Project is fixated on technology, anxiety and work - common subjects in contemporary literature, yet in Pester's voice they are ­rendered fresh, sublime and eerie. He could be described, in part, as a comic descendant of J?G Ballard, or an English version of the great absurdist Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal... Pester is a talented writer of the surreal... A novel about dis­location that feels dislocating. It should serve as an ominous warning to us all -- Camilla Grudova * Sunday Telegraph *
Surreal and unsettling... Pester's deceptively lucid prose mocks office platitudes but also gets to the crux of the loneliness and alienation bred by corporate language and spaces... With a steely commitment to its outlandish form and plot, Pester's novel is as nebulous, mind-bending and delightfully strange as the workplace it describes * Observer *
This ambitious debut skewers the absurdities of office life and bureaucracy with sharp, surreal wit... Crackles with invention... Pester has an ear for deadpan absurdity... Exhilaratingly weird * Daily Mail *
Inside the closed world of the novel, [Pester] has succeeded in creating an extreme "drowning out" of the normal sounds of human life and activity. I appreciated Pester's well-executed vision of a genuinely soul-sucking workplace... Magical, folk horror-informed and time-twisting. A world lurking unseen alongside everyday linear British life * Financial times *
Pester's satirical and surreal scrutiny pushes the concept of the 'work-life balance' to its limit... The Expansion Project has echoes of texts such as Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (for the institutional sci-fi) and the plays of Sarah Kane (for the howling emptiness bumping up against the mundane). But Pester's fiction is its own beast... This is not a cheerful book, but it is a funny one * Times Literary Supplement *
A debut novel with echoes of Kafka, Flaubert and the office sitcom... Both poignant and disconcerting... Beautifully observed... A fever dream of a novel - disconcerting, strange and unexpectedly touching * Spectator *
It's within the mundane that Pester lodges (or dislodges) the strangest things... Pester's satirical and surreal scrutiny pushes the concept of the 'work-life balance' to its limit... The Expansion Project has echoes of texts such as Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go ... But Pester's fiction is its own beast... * London Review of Books *
If you think you are about to read a realist novel about everyday life and work in 21st century England, you have another think coming... A radically untethered fictional world... Splendidly inventive... I'm not completely sure I understand what's happening at the end, but that seems as it should be, and the tricksiness and elusiveness of Pester's technique makes the reading experience abundantly worth it. The Expansion Project is a wonderfully strange and haunting book * Literary Review *
A magnificently destabilising?rendering of work life which is both familiar and totally foreign; boundaries between the real and the mediated, the father and the man, the worker and the person, all begin to warp and bleed. Disturbing, funny and deeply odd, this is a novel for the ages, but especially ours -- Megan Nolan
Ben Pester renders the baffling peculiarity of employment with a subversive imagination that should get him fired. The Expansion Project is a weird, unsettling, moving book about how we are lost from each other - and ourselves - in a labyrinth we made, and which now makes us -- Keith Ridgway
Terrific. An offbeat and deft exploration of memory, grief and parental love. Ben Pester continues to impress me with his talents -- Irenosen Okojie
It's one thing to write a subversive novel; another thing altogether to write a subversive novel that gives narrative ballast to its batshit. Here is a novel that does. A surrealist nightmare that flows with its own logic, humour, politics and plot energy -- Ross Raisin
I can think of few other writers who can seamlessly blend the hyper-real and the humane, or make the allegorical hit home with this emotional depth. Pester is a genius of capturing the vicissitudes of contemporary life... The Expansion Project imbues the absurd with soul... Mordantly funny but never cynical... At times frightening, at times genuinely moving in a way I wish I knew how to do. This is an eagerly awaited debut novel... and it delivers on every expectation. Ultimately revitalising, and heralds what I hope might be a new direction in UK fiction -- Luke Kennard
A profoundly moving, extraordinary novel that deftly combines the numinous and otherworldly with the prosaic and quotidian to the most powerful emotional effect. Witty, touching, layered and entirely original -- Rose Ruane
Ben Pester is my favourite cartographer for that zone in the soul where panic shades into true metaphysical horror... He makes it look so easy... His emotional range is too deep for us to feel manipulated. We panic with his characters. They say our panic in their words... A clean, stinging joy, a disquieted ache, a clean reminder of how hard it is to have to be here, and how much harder again to have to leave -- Tim MacGabhann
A slippery jewel of a novel that refracts received notions on work and family to ask: at what point do we realise we have stepped out of the life we thought we had? It casts light on the fog of corporate language which makes the world unrecognisable, and which wraps itself around our frailties until we also cannot recognise ourselves. This is a luminous and startling novel from a unique new voice -- Samuel Fisher
A fever-dream of a book... This surreal trip into a Severance-esque corporate world is deeply unsettling, compelling and very entertaining. I loved it -- Jo Leevers
I was mesmerised by this inventive, stifled scream of a novel about work, time, space and relationships under late capitalism, full of the eerie strangeness of Severance, by way of Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, Graeme Macrae Burnet's Case Study and Olga Ravn's The Employees... This is an essential read -- (Book of the Month) * The Bookseller *
The Expansion Project is an office novel of a very different kind... A horror story about screen society, in which sensations are constant and images refuse to separate into the real and imagined * Guardian *
This ambitious debut skewers the absurdities of office life and bureaucracy with sharp, surreal wit... Crackles with invention... Undeniable talent at work here. Exhilaratingly weird * Irish Mail *
This funny, inventive and unsettling debut has elements of J.G. Ballard as well as Stephen King, plus cringeworthy workplace comedy made familiar by The Office * Scottish Daily Mail *
This unsettling, but gripping, read will resonate not only with parents, but with anyone familiar with the modern workplace and the way it can bleed into all aspects of life * Courier *