Then We Came to the End is your life and my life. It is how we spend our days and too many of our nights. It is about being away from friends and family, about sharing a stretch of stained tiled carpet with a group of strangers we call colleagues. It is about sitting all morning next to someone you deliberately cross the road to avoid at lunchtime.

Joshua Ferris's brilliant first novel follows a group of white-collar workers as they struggle to go about their lives amidst the constant fear of who will be next to 'walk Spanish down the hall'.