Help Wanted

Help Wanted

By Adelle Waldman

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

2024

Every day at 3:55 a.m., members of Team Movement clock in for their shift at big-box store Town Square in a small upstate New York town. Under the eyes of a self-absorbed and barely competent boss, they empty the day’s truck of merchandise, stock the shelves, and scatter before the store opens and customers arrive. Their lives follow a familiar if grueling routine, but their real problem is that Town Square doesn’t schedule them for enough hours—most of them are barely getting by, even while working second or third jobs. When store manager Big Will announces he is leaving, the members of Movement spot an opportunity. If they play their cards right, one of them just might land a management job, with all the stability and possibility for advancement that that implies. The members of Team Movement—including a comedy-obsessed oddball who acts half his age, a young woman clinging on to her “cool kid” status from high school, and a college football hopeful trying to find a new path—band together to set a just-so-crazy-it-might-work plot in motion.

Adelle Waldman’s debut novel was a breakout sensation, lauded by the Los Angeles Times as an “exacting character study” with “excellent and witty prose” and described as “incisive and very funny” by the Economist and “brilliant” by both NPR’s Fresh Air and the Washington Post. In her long-awaited follow-up, Waldman brings her unparalleled wit and astute social observation to the world of modern, low-wage work. A humane and darkly comic workplace caper that shines a light on the odds low-wage workers are up against in today’s economy, Help Wanted is a funny, moving tale of ordinary people trying to make a living.

Adelle Waldman

Adelle Waldman is the author of the novels, Help Wanted (W.W. Norton, 2024) and The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (Henry Holt, 2013). Help Wanted has been named a best book of 2024 The Economist and Time and was recommended by Barack Obama as one of his picks for the summer of summer of 2024. The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. was named one of 2013’s best books by The New Yorker, The Economist, The New Republic, NPR, Slate, Bookforum, The Guardian and many others. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, among other publications. She lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with her husband and daughter.