Then We Came to the End, By Joshua Ferris

This is a novel as hard to forget for the way it is written as for the stories it contains. "We were fractious and overpaid," it begins. The unnamed narrator, one of a group of employees at a US advertising agency, uses "We" for the entire length of the novel, never "I", but Ferris flaunts this uncommon perspective as if it's the most natural thing in the world – that's really how it feels. Of course it does: everybody is looking for their "I" to become a "we", to form new relationships.

After just the first few pages you find yourself part of the group, following the stories almost as if you were one of the characters. And Ferris achieves this so subtly (it would have been very easy, writing a book like this, to shut readers out, making them feel as if they're watching the silly rituals of an unpleasant clique). Right away he offers up a character called Tom Mota as an outsider. Mota "was built like a bulldog, stocky, with foreshortened limbs and a rippling succession of necks. He didn't belong where we were"; he is made redundant and goes mad, snipping off the legs of his trousers in the office, frightening the other employees into thinking he might return to exact bloody revenge.

One by one, more characters are introduced, trailing stories which start off as office gossip but which soon enmesh everyone and have serious ramifications. Janine Gorjanc returns to work after losing her little girl. The office starts to hum with news that the boss, Lyn Mason, apparently has cancer. Carl Garbedian starts running laps of the building and, in meetings, begins to shield his eyes from the light.

This is an exceptional debut novel: unpretentious but often emotionally demanding; occasionally absurd and regularly very funny. It isn't really a book about work, either; it's a novel exploring how groups of people get along and what they do in order to survive.

Penguin, £7.99