The Beautiful Bureaucrat

In a windowless building in a remote part of town, the newly employed Josephine inputs an endless string of numbers into something known only as The Database. After a long period of joblessness, she's not inclined to question her fortune, but as the days inch by and the files stack up, Josephine feels increasingly anxious in her surroundings-the office's scarred pinkish walls take on a living quality, the drone of keyboards echoes eerily down the long halls. When one evening her husband Joseph disappears and then returns, offering no explanation as to his whereabouts, her creeping unease shifts decidedly to dread. As other strange events build to a crescendo, the haunting truth about Josephine's work begins to take shape in her mind, even as something powerful is gathering its own form within her. She realizes that in order to save those she holds most dear, she must penetrate an institution whose tentacles seem to extend to every corner of the city and beyond. Both chilling and poignant, The Beautiful Bureaucrat is a novel of rare restraint and imagination. With it, Helen Phillips enters the company of Murakami, Bender, and Atwood as she twists the world we know and shows it back to us full of meaning and wonder-luminous and new.

'Atmospheric... claustrophobic... enjoyably absurdist' -- Financial Times

'Assured and sometimes ingenious' -- Sunday Times

'Brilliantly weird and wonderful dystopian book' -- Refinery29

'Poignant, witty and surreal by turns' --Foyles

'A creepy and unnerving read while remaining enjoyable and intriguing' -- Book and Brew

'For those looking for something a bit different to spice their summer reading' -- The Idle Woman (blog)

'Strange, compelling novella in which Phillips manages to out-Kafka Kafka' -- A Life in Books (blog)

'Wholly original and utterly preposterous and entirely compelling' -- Josh is Writing (blog)

'A perfect "off the beaten track" holiday book, both readable and entertaining' -- The Riverside Way (blog)

'I thoroughly enjoyed this dystopian read and it keeps playing over in my mind, just who pulls the strings in our lives and how much self-control do we have over our days? The book won't give you all the answers, but where would the fun be in that?!' -- Dogeared Reads (blog)

'Darkly ambiguous, it's hard not to find yourself sucked into Helen Phillips' dystopian world' -- Pale + Interesting (blog)

'A short fabulist novel that takes the mundane reality of being a twenty-something pencil pusher in a post-crash economy and turns it into an eerie, unpredictable parallel with an element of playing God... absolutely brilliant ending' -- Robotnic (blog)

'Made me laugh on the first page... I liked the quirky prose and odd perspective' -- Kate Vane Books (blog)

'This debut novel will have the power and readability to stay in the mind a mighty long time' --The Bookbag

'Chilling... the perfect summer page-turner' -- Chicago Tribune

'Riveting... thrillerlike... Ultimately, The Beautiful Bureaucrat succeeds because it isn't afraid to ask the deepest questions' -- The New York Times Book Review

'Kafka would love The Beautiful Bureaucrat... It's a surprising revelation of a book from an uncompromising author as unique as she is talented' -- NPR

'A joyride... a very weird, very beautiful, very honest book about the surreal business of working in a city, living in a fertile and dying body, and loving another mortal' -- Slate

'Unusual... deeply interesting... irresistible... Mrs. Phillips has a wickedly funny eye, a fine sense of pacing, a smooth, winning writing style and a great gift for a telling detail... breathtaking and wondrous' -- New York Times

'Equal parts mystery, thriller, and existential inquiry... The Beautiful Bureaucrat asks uneasy questions about work and life, love and power, and where the whole enterprise of one's own small life is swiftly headed' -- New Republic

'Part dystopian fantasy, part thriller, part giddy literary-nerd wordplay, Helen Phillips' The Beautiful Bureaucrat is both a page-turner and a novel rich in evocative, starkly philosophical language... eerie, stomach-dropping... this novel ultimately proves both clever and impossible to put down' -- L.A. Times

'A bewitching parable' -- Vanity Fair

'An addictive, uncanny experience... Her prose is exact, at once ominous and droll, and her pacing is perfect. As she probes the mysteries of marriage and mortality, choice and chance, freedom and fate, her pages command close focus - and fly by very fast' -- The Atlantic

'Mesmerizing... the perfect kind of strange to keep your brain twisted into knots during a flight (think Kafka or Calvino), and the kind of thrilling that'll have you on edge until you've run out of pages to turn. You'll devour this one before wheels-down on the tarmac' -- Elle

'Uncanny and Kafkaesque... By turns, the novel is goofily funny, creepy and unsettling, life-affirming and sweet, deeply thoughtful and pointedly critical of modern workplace culture... A strange, yet unsettlingly resonant fable that melds mystery, sic-fi, romance and satire to chillingly skewer the modern workplace yet somehow leave us reaffirmed in our humanity' -- Huffington Post

'Told with the light touch of a Calvino and the warm heart of a Saramago, this brief fable-novel is funny, sad, scary and beautiful' -- Ursula K. Le Guin

'A satisfying parable of love and life, death and birth, and the travails of transposed numbers. The Beautiful Bureaucrat reads like a thriller' -- Joshua Ferris

'A thrillingly original debut, formally inventive and emotionally complex. Helen Phillips is one of the most exciting young writers working today, and I envy those who get to discover her work here for the first time' -- Jenny Offill

'The Beautiful Bureaucrat has the compulsive quality of a mystery and the furious urgency of a fever dream. I picked it up and read it everywhere: on the subway, over breakfast, in bed when I should have been sleeping, at work when I should have been working. It will coax you into its world with the crystalline precision of its prose, so flu of heart and strangeness it might even crawl into your own dreams and find you there' -- Leslie Jamison

'In the bleak hallways of bureaucracy, Helen Phillips explores what it means to ale a life one's own. The Beautiful Bureaucrat is a page-turning mystery, a love story and a revelation' --Ramona Ausubel