Ben Pester's debut novel, The Expansion Project, is a surreal exploration of corporate life, following Tom Crowley as he searches for his missing daughter in the labyrinthine corridors of Capmeadow Business Park. The story, set on bring-your-daughter-to-work day, quickly descends into a nightmare where Tom is forced to sign an affidavit denying his daughter's existence, becoming a ghost haunting the office.
The novel is structured as a collage assembled by an unnamed Archivist in the future, who becomes drawn into Tom's story while meant to be studying the business park's 'Expansion Project'. This framing echoes Pester's earlier story collection, Am I in the Right Place?, which shares the same office setting and surrealist approach.
Pester's work stands apart from the current wave of workplace novels by prioritising abstraction over concrete detail. Readers learn little about Tom's actual job or the nature of the Expansion Project, which is intentional. However, this abstraction risks cliché, with Capmeadow's line managers, mindfulness apps, and dehumanising HR feeling familiar rather than fresh.
The novel's power lies not in satire but in its protagonist. Tom is a figure of pain, struggling with parenting and corporate survival, and his breakdown foreshadows a broader collapse of reality. The business park's surreal landscape—complete with cloud-forestry and a Resilience Garden—extends the logic of AI-generated Zoom backgrounds, making the novel less a critique of capitalism than a vision of its logical endpoint.
