A Working Title I Want to Change - by Saul Leslie (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Explores the bleach-scented, dizzyingly over-lit world of a supermarket's aisles, as austerity makes everyone within the store's walls poorer.

Set against the backdrop of Britain's austerity years in 2013-14, A Working Title follows the lives of exhausted supermarket employees whose struggles mirror the political and social upheavals of the time. Under the harsh fluorescent glare of Tesco's flagship store, consumerism's rituals and illusions are exposed in all their banality and menace.

At the centre is a nameless employee, cycling through the discarded name badges of his dismissed colleagues, gradually absorbing their identities and stories. As he drifts between shifts and the precariousness of temporary homelessness, his voice becomes a haunting chorus of the dispossessed--trapped in the surreal labyrinth of the modern superstore, yet still searching for dignity and meaning in the margins of everyday life.

Review Quotes

"Saul Leslie has divined the deflating end point of Bataille's unproductive expenditure in the abandoned shopping trolley, stuck in the mire halfway between damp valediction and the base matter of bureaucratic Albion. A sacred conspiracy of consumer ennui, scried in his mordant sweep round its British aisles."
- Sophie Sleigh-Johnson, author of Code: Damp

"Full of revealing observations about metropolitan life in the early twenty-first century, it is written in exuberant, richly enjoyable prose."
- Matthew Beaumont, author of Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London

"Lovely, clever, both incredibly silly at points and also deadly, heartbreakingly serious."
- Sheila Liming, author of Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time

"Finally: the great supermarket novel. A wickedly sharp tale of work and life under modern capitalism that will resonate with anyone who has ever worked on the tills."
- Dan Evans, author of A Nation of Shopkeepers

"Imagine Charles Bukowski rewritten by John Milton and James Joyce for a post-pop cultural age. This is exciting, fearsomely brilliant and witty writing -- a stunning and engrossing fictional debut, a brilliant head-rush -- and it never gives in."
- Philip Hoare, author of William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love

About the Author

Saul Leslie is a writer and academic in Liverpool. He teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Liverpool and Hope University. His fiction has been published by Bloomsbury and Liverpool University Press, and his remarks about disability and literature have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, The Conversation, and The Poetry Review. His academic research on disability and employment was instrumental in influencing policy that brought about the British Sign Language Act in 2022. In addition to his PhD research on disability and the workplace, he also works with Penguin-Random House as an editor of disabled writers' memoirs and novels.