Then We Came to the End: A Novel | 
 enlarge | Author: Joshua Ferris
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Category: EBooks
List Price: $13.99
Buy New: $9.99
You Save: $4.00 (29%)
Rating:  243 reviews
Sales Rank: 5640
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Pages: 400
Number Of Items: 1
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
Publication Date: March 1, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month Spotlight Title, April 2007: It's 2001. The dot-com bubble has burst and rolling layoffs have hit an unnamed Chicago advertising firm sending employees into an escalating siege mentality as their numbers dwindle. As a parade of employees depart, bankers boxes filled with their personal effects, those left behind raid their fallen comrades' offices, sifting through the detritus for the errant desk lamp or Aeron chair. Written with confidence in the tricky-to-pull-off first-person plural, the collective fishbowl perspective of the "we" voice nails the dynamics of cubicle culture--the deadlines, the gossip, the elaborate pranks to break the boredom, the joy of discovering free food in the breakroom. Arch, achingly funny, and surprisingly heartfelt, it's a view of how your work becomes a symbiotic part of your life. A dysfunctional family of misfits forced together and fondly remembered as it falls apart. Praised as "the Catch-22 of the business world" and "The Office meets Kafka," I'm happy to report that Joshua Ferris's brilliant debut lives up to every ounce of pre-publication hype and instantly became one of my favorite books of the year. --Brad Thomas Parsons
Product Description
No one knows us quite the same way as the men and women who sit beside us in department meetings and crowd the office refrigerator with their labeled yogurts.- Every office is a family of sorts, and the ad agency Joshua Ferris brilliantly depicts in his debut novel is family at its strangest and best, coping with a business downturn in the time-honored way: through gossip, pranks, and increasingly frequent coffee breaks.
---- With a demon's eye for the details that make life worth noticing, Joshua Ferris tells a true and funny story about survival in life's strangest environment--the one we pretend is normal five days a week.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 238 more reviews...
 A Spectacular Debut July 1, 2009
Paul Stevens (San Diego, CA)
The We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris is a great debut novel by a obviously gifted writer. His prose is well crafted and humorous.
The novel is a work of satire. Set in an advertising company at the time of its downfall, the book features a wide cast of characters who all possess their own uniquely human virtues and vices. It will make you laugh hard one page and cry on the next.
The book is not written in a linear manner so keep that in mind while reading. The book is told in an all encompassing narrative style which allows the reader to feel as if we are part of the novel.
Joshua Ferris himself worked at an advertising agency before going on to receive his MFA in Creative Writing from University of California, Irvine. His presence is felt throughout the novel, and his own experience with office work allows a deeper insight into the fishbowl.
Simply put I could not ask more out of a novel than I got from Joshua Ferris. I was captivated from the opening line, "We were fractious and overpaid." This is one of my favorite books.
 Inside the office June 29, 2009
G. E. Mullin
This is a funny, entertaining, and perceptive (fiction) story about personal inter-actions in advertising agency that is encountering hard economic times. Definitely worthwhile reading that may tell many of us something about ourselves.
 Lightweight novel says little early and often June 29, 2009
J. Kendall (Jarrettsville, MD United States)
This book was passed on to me by a friend who praised its comical look at office culture. The blurbs, back cover summary, and reviews all invite comparisons to "The Office" and "Office Space", both of which mine absurd humor but also pathos from the modern day cubicle careers so many of us face on a daily basis. Simply put, this book, by comparison to those excellent satires, is flat and shallow with uninspired characters engaging in uninteresting banter about insipid matters. The copywriters and designers in this novel are more like caricatures than well rounded, developed characters about which one would care to read. One guy is the "whacky office gossip"; therefore he has a skeleton dressed as "Buck Rogers" in his office and wears Hawaiian shirts. The "disgruntled intellectual" spouts both inappropriate profanity and Emerson quotes with equal aplomb before engaging in behavior that is easily predicted by even the most distracted reader well before the end of the novel. I really wouldn't feel the need to write this negative review, which is of course only my opinion, but for the fact that this novel has amazingly won so many accolades. In light of the hype, I was honestly taken aback by how amateurish and boring the exercise really was for me and just had to share. The interview with the Author that was appended to my copy indicates this novel was completed while he was finishing his education in writing; I can only hope he is capable of creating better things with said education, although getting published is a trick not easy to pull off, so he should at least be congratulated for that. One more thing; if one is going to write a review, at least do the Author the courtesy of reading the entire book. I didn't enjoy it very much, but this was an extremely breezy read, even for a slow reader such as me. Again, just my own opinion, but if you can't bother to read the whole book, your review of its worth means little to anyone else.
I wanted to like this book, I really did. June 28, 2009
PWJ (Silver Spring, MD)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I was so eager to read this book. I spent more years than I care to remember working in a PR office, so I thought this book couldn't fail; even if it was light-weight and/or badly written I would like it, I thought. Wrong. I gave it a good try, 100 pages or so. But at the end of the 100 pages I felt no connection with any of the characters and, even more deadly, I hadn't laughed or snickered once. Sorry for the negative review. I give it 2 stars for a good attempt.
I put in a lot of effort and never got to the end June 27, 2009
Mary L. Mcgough (La Jolla, California)
I tried and tried and tried to like this. But I just couldn't get in to the story of the pathetic lives of the office workers and their gossip. I expected it to be sort of like Office Space because - hey: I have the pathetic life of an office worker so I thought I would get the joke. But like an Oliver Stone film it just seemed to carry the same theme on and on and on without much of a story arc to keep me going. I totally respect anyone who loved the book. It just wasn't for me.
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