In the office you have to leave your dreaming behind, and live in the front of the head where all the analysis is done, where the facts of history are plotted, where logic operates, where emotion is scantily represented.’

An unending heatwave heightens the strange claustrophobia of the nine to five. Lou, Sarah, Verity, Susan, Casey, Isabel, Nell and Audrey all work together; they know the intimate details of each other’s lives, but also nothing at all. They are co-conspirators and competitors, support network and enemies. They track the moods of the men in charge on a menstrual chart while dreaming of escaping to their gardens.

In Moya Costello’s incisive and dreamlike prose, The Office as a Boat, first published in 2000, provides a deadpan field study of working days – with their gossip, banality and missing stationery – while suggesting the possibility of breaking free. This new edition, with an introduction by bestselling author Holly Gramazio, makes for a quirky and very funny desk companion.

‘A joy.’ The Canberra Times

‘Beautifully clear and visually precise.' Katharine England, The Advertiser

‘There is wit, irony and comedy in the writing, and also an assured seriousness and high intelligence.’ The Age

‘Recodes the banal as sublime … delightful, provocative, funny.’ Jen Webb, Idiom

‘Costello slips easefully from slice-of-life realist prose to magic realism, from social history to imaginative fancy.’ Imago