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‘I clean the offices and bathrooms and lobby five nights a week, but my actual job is to take care of everyone. They need so much help.’
At night, in a corporate office block in an unnamed metropolitan city, the cleaner begins her shift. If she didn’t leave everything so spotless you’d never even know she’d been there – but she knows all about you.
She knows about the self-help books that Sad Intern hides in her desk, alongside ever-multiplying supplements designed to make her seem less sad. She knows about Mr Buff’s secret smoking habit, which she’s going to help him kick. She’s fond of you all, and she’s got more influence over your lives than you could possibly know.
And one night, while lazily scrolling through emails on the CEO’s computer, she’ll discover some shady dealings that put the entire company – her realm – at risk of closure.
She has no intention of allowing that to happen.
At night, in a corporate office block in an unnamed metropolitan city, the cleaner begins her shift. If she didn’t leave everything so spotless you’d never even know she’d been there – but she knows all about you.
She knows about the self-help books that Sad Intern hides in her desk, alongside ever-multiplying supplements designed to make her seem less sad. She knows about Mr Buff’s secret smoking habit, which she’s going to help him kick. She’s fond of you all, and she’s got more influence over your lives than you could possibly know.
And one night, while lazily scrolling through emails on the CEO’s computer, she’ll discover some shady dealings that put the entire company – her realm – at risk of closure.
She has no intention of allowing that to happen.
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Reviews
A sharp and toothy portrait of a life devoted to the convenience of others . . . Cleaner skilfully satirizes the work-place novel, offering cutting insights on the hypocrisy and empty ambitions of grind culture.
Brandi Wells's Cleaner is a fantastic office novel, a keen evocation of our deep desire for dignity in the workplace and for recognition of a job well done. It's also a smart thriller about what the essential workers you choose not to see might right now be thinking about you-and a sharp reminder that you ignore the people upon whom your good life depends at your own peril.
What a total delight it is to roam this (almost) empty building with Brandi Wells' cleaner who is always peering (and neatening) the surfaces of people's lives and finding so much depth in there to mess with - Here's a new and key addition to office fiction and a thrilling debut novel by a propulsive voice.
The most richly crafted delusion of a novel since Ottessa Moshfegh's Eileen. I couldn't put it down - an exquisite novel!
Brandi Wells has created a biting, witty, pitch-perfect novel about one woman's desire to connect with her office co-workers - the only problem is, she cleans the office during the night and they work during the day. Cleaner is funny, slyly moving, and totally weirdly wonderful, and Brandi Wells is a gloriously bold writer. I adored it.
Suspenseful, obsessive, and scalpel-sharp, Cleaner is an ultra-vivid and profound parable of contemporary work life imbued with the soft blue glow of a middle manager's computer screen at night. In other words, Wells brilliantly documents all the ways we make each other feel small and unseen at the workplace (and the tactics we may use to dismantle these hierarchies) in this electrifying, singular debut.
Welcome to the office building at night, an eerie and yet totally mundane ship helmed by one woman desperate for connection and valiantly, perhaps delusionally, striving for meaning in her work. Brandi Wells' Cleaner is laugh out loud funny, but its project of validating unseen labor is totally serious. This is a book that celebrates humanity, even while tearing down the corporate culture that denies it in the drollest and wittiest of ways.
There are people who pass unnoticed, but who nevertheless quietly shape the worlds that others occupy. Cleaner is about one such person, about someone who, secretly, without being detected, subtly tugs on the strings that remain unseen to so many others, changing lives that even after the fact often don't know who or what has changed them. Cleaner is a clever portrait that scrapes away the slick veneer of the everyday to reveal the rough grain of the wood beneath.
Razor-sharp ... biting and compulsive.
A darkly funny tale.
Is it just office trash or the ephemera of a life? Bursting from the cleaning closet of meditative workplace novels like Nicholson Baker's Mezzanine, Wells masterfully invites the reader into the beating heart of a workplace, uncovering secrets, fantasies, and sorrows with every cleaned cubicle and vacuumed hallway. An unflinchingly honest and often fanciful mediation on people through the lens of an invisible worker who clocks in after five.
[A] compulsively readable workplace satire.
A sharply observed offbeat gem of a novel. A book that has you questioning what the mess you leave behind says about you . . .
A darkly funny, off-beat read.
'Unsettling, with a smart, satisfying ending.'
I absolutely loved this offbeat, bold and witty novel that skewers corporate culture and shines a light on the overlooked and under-appreciated hands that keep the world turning.
You'll never leave your desk drawer unlocked overnight again.