‘For the forgotten who have been worked to death,’ reads the dedication in Molly McGhee’s debut novel, a late-capitalist workplace story and warning cry. McGhee is all too familiar with the burden of work. In 2022, she shared her resignation letter as an assistant editor at Tor and called out prejudice against junior workers in the publishing world. The year before, in an article for The Paris Review, she attributed her mother’s death to chronic unemployment and an overwhelming debt which McGhee then inherited.

Her frustration and understandable bitterness toward the world of work manifests itself in Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind. Abernathy is a lonely young man drowning in debt. He is failing at life and has one desire: ‘to be told what to do in exchange for money’. When a mysterious government agency offers him a job, he wastes no time reading the T&Cs. His task: enter the dreams of white-collar workers and remove any elements of unease, grief or fear that could lead to a lack of productivity in their waking working hours. 

Humour is paired perfectly with moments of heart-wrenching bleakness, and although Abernathy is comedically hopeless, his desperation to succeed is so relatable that we forgive him for naively planting his head in the sand while he becomes complicit in a sinister scheme. McGhee considers the catastrophic loss of humanity when work is prioritised over all else. What happens when there is no longer space for love, family, friends or happiness?

The novel is cleverly dream-like with time fluctuating suddenly, where both the narrative and trippy imaginary arena overlap with the real world. After putting the book down, you feel as though you’ve awakened from a trance. Scarily, the world outside bears an all-too deep resemblance to the work-obsessed dystopian one on these pages. 

Molly McGhee: Jonathan Abernethy You Are Kind is published by 4th Estate on Thursday 1 February; main picture: Pete Perry.