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Martin’s girlfriend has left him, another woman he loves is getting married, and he can’t see how he can ever escape work because he’s deeply in debt. At the center of the story is Martin Davies, a process accountant and would-be writer. It is peopled by a cast of young office workers who spend most of their time emailing each other about anything but work-gossip, banter, the weekend’s plans, dreams of escape to London.

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A series of sackings are described euphemistically as “off-boarding 15 to 20 per cent of our family,” and the individuals affected are chosen by a process known as “Project Uplift.” Or as Lukes, who has little time for his wife or children or mother, observes: “There is a lot of negative baggage around the term ‘homeless.’”Įleven is set on a single day-9/11-in Cardiff. But as with all satire there is a serious point here too, about the way in which corporate culture allows language to obscure narcissism, inauthenticity, and unpleasantness. We need to find where those holes are, and find ways of blocking them.” Well, quite.Ī kind of Bridget Jones for marketers, this is a very funny book indeed. “Energy pours in, but pours out again through the holes. “Think of yourself like a colander,” she advises him.

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We follow him over the course of a calendar year in which he must deal with marital separation, professional rejection and rebirth, troubles with his children, office affairs, rebrandings and corporate cock-ups-and all of it set against the expensively nonsensical nostrums of Pandora. (“Can we compromise and say I’m going to be 22.5 per cent better than the best I can be?”) When Lukes, a character who began as the subject of a humorous weekly newspaper column, fails to land a plum new job, he engages life coach Pandora (motto: “Strive to thrive!”) and is soon engaging in heated negotiations with her over his maximum potential. It’s largely told through the emails of fictitious marketer Martin Lukes, the sort of man who sends motivational emails to his own children, advising them, for example, to come up with “six key behaviors that will help you going forward.” Though Who Moved My Blackberry? is a clear descendant of e, it is a triumphant satire of marketing and corporate nonsense in its own right. Who Moved My Blackberry? by Lucy Kellaway Beaumont, who had worked as an advertising copywriter himself, went on to write a follow-up, e Squared (2010), with text messages added to the mix.Ģ. The book was a bestseller in several countries, and for a time Miller Shanks even had its own fictitious website. In the ad industry itself, meanwhile, copywriters gnashed their teeth with envy and tried to work out who was who. But at the time, reviewers welcomed a hip new voice that had updated the epistolary novel for the modern age. The plot is pure office farce, and with its exploding implants, Y2K references, light bulb-obsessed jobsworths, creative prima donnas, and a boss with “an MBA from the Joseph Stalin School of Management,” it feels a tad dated now. There’s also a creative team on a location shoot for a porn channel in Mauritius, where they bump into Ivana Trump and lose each of their models to a series of comedy misfortunes. Because of an IT snafu, all the CEO’s messages are being rerouted via the Helsinki office, which brings the Finns in with a rival pitch of their own. The company’s big idea was actually stolen by creative director Simon Horne from a couple of recent college graduates. The story takes place in a fictitious ad agency, Miller Shanks, and captures some of the hedonistic excess for which the ad industry was notorious in the late 20th century.Īt the start of the book, Miller Shanks has two weeks to win the prestigious $84 billion Coca-Cola account. Probably the best-known email novel of them all, Matt Beaumont’s e was originally published with the subtitle The Novel of Liars, Lunch and Lost Knickers.

What follows is a list of ten of the best novels written as email. But as this list shows, writers have used emails in lots of other interesting ways too, delivering effects that are by turns hilarious, moving, romantic, poetic, and even erotic. The email novel often takes place in a corporate setting, where it can shed light in interesting ways on the scandals and disappointments of office life. The advent of email created a sort of electronic sub-genre of the classic epistolary tale. It’s a fascinating form that allows for a complex interplay of different characters and plot lines-and for plenty of dramatic confusion as messages overlap, are read by the wrong people, or are read in the wrong order.

Clarissa, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, The Sorrows of Young Werther…the epistolary novel has a long and distinguished tradition, predating the classic doorstoppers of the 18th century.

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