‘The Expansion Project’

We’ve all been to The Expansion Project, an ordinary day in the office when you feel like you’re not really there. Maybe you aren’t?

The Expansion Project is a literary science fiction novel by Ben Pester. It explores the unreality of the workplace as a metaphor for life. It’s David Graber’s Bullshit Jobs expressed in a work of fiction. The workplace as a simulation in a Philip K Dick novel. A liminal space in Backrooms or Exit 8. It’s the alien world of Annihilation. The ‘zone’ from Stalker. Whatever The Expansion Project is… it’s a bizarre and surreal place that’s been archived at some point in the distant future by an archivist who also isn’t ‘feeling it’.

There is no satisfying explanation telling us what it’s all about. This is literary science fiction, after all, not genre fiction. So, it’s the experience of the narrative and the language that is the destination rather than a story arc with a conclusion to the journey.

Literary science fiction seems to be having something of a renaissance. Much like the death of the Western genre spawned literary Westerns like Blood Meridian – the current stasis of the science fiction genre has seen the rise of literary science fiction novels like Klara and the Sun, Machines Like Me, The Second Sleep, and now The Expansion Project.

‘Audition’

Audition is a novel by Katie Kitamura. It was shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize and it was a finalist for the 2026 Pulitzer Prize.

The story – written in first person, past tense – explores the narrator’s experience of being an actress, a wife, and a ‘mother’. The stage and thespian world are used as a backdrop to the explain the disconnected happenstance, the acted out ‘unreality’ of the real world. Stage craft is contextualised with people acting out their relationships.

At first, I was expecting more of a plotted drama, but then I realised that this is a literary fiction experience that’s primarily about nuance and the nature of existence. The story is framed through the woman’s encounter with a young man who claims to be her son – even though she knows that he’s lying. He inserts himself into her life in an act of ‘brood parasitism’, appearing like a cuckoos egg in a warbler’s nest.

The stranger as ‘kin’ scenario is a literary metaphor for the close distance of relationships, where people are intimate with one another and yet emotionally detached.

‘Flesh’

David Szalay’s Flesh won the 2025 Booker Prize. The title Flesh conjures up nihilism or hedonism, neither of which particularly appeals to me. So, it’s taken a while to overcome that barrier and read the novel. Flesh is not nihilist or hedonistic. And much of the commentary about the novel gets it wrong. Reviews have focused on the ‘minimalistic’ prose, the overly ‘passive’ protagonist, and the frequent use of one word dialogue, like ‘okay’ and ‘yeah’.

After reading the novel, I can say that the text does have some elaborate prose, so it’s not as minimalist as people might imagine. And when the flourishes happen they feel slightly incongruous next to the sparse dialogue, but it does provide a contrast. The accusation of the story having a ‘passive’ protagonist is a bit weird. The protagonist is an ordinary man, a ‘regular guy’ with faults. He is unlucky in some ways, lucky in others. He has anger management issues and he doesn’t appear to be in touch with himself. He’s traumatised by life. The one word dialogue does become repetitive, even if it’s there to illustrate human disconnection.

The long time span, aspects of the prose style, and the use of condensed vignettes reminds me of Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13. The sexual and self-discovery dimension has echoes of Stephen Vizinczey’s novel In Praise of Older Women (which is also about the life of Hungarian man). One final comparison is the human journey in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

So, what is Flesh? It’s the story of a man’s life, from adolescence to middle age. The narrative provokes questions about life choices and living a meaningful life.

‘Slow Horses’

Mick Herron’s 2010 novel Slow Horses is the first novel in a twelve book series. It’s also been adapted into a successful Apple TV series. If Len Deighton’s The Ipcress File is about class, Slow Horses is about misfits surviving work politics.

Where The Office poked fun at the workplace, Slow Horses explores it with a cynical dark humour. There’s an assortment of eccentric characters, including a disheveled departmental boss who eats heart-attack food, has disgusting personal habits, and throws in the occasional politically incorrect comment.

The key to Slow Horses is the bad luck character origin story and rooting for the underdog.

‘The Housemaid’

Freida McFaddens’s The Housemaid is a tense psychological mystery with a great plot twist. It’s an accessible, fun read. The movie is out and it is equally entertaining.

The story plays with genre conventions – working with and also subverting them. It’s a fresh take on The Girl on the Train meets 90s psychological mysteries. There’s also a contemporary #metoo vibe.