‘The Kingdom is blistering, funny, and brokenhearted, like the best human writing. Count me a member of the cult of Noorali.’ – Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask and No One Left to Come Looking for You

‘Yoel Noorali – along with all the ghost-Yoels who float through these pages – has turned the despair and alienation of modern work into a source of pure pleasure. This is the funniest, knottiest, most exhilaratingly jaded debut of the year.’ – Joe Dunthorne, author of Submarine and Children of Radium

‘Each story in The Kingdom is anchored by a stupid idea pursued to its natural, relatable conclusion, which is what most great literature does, I think.’ – Zac Smith, author of Everything Is Totally Fine

‘A funny and insightful book with a unique comic tone.’ – Kevin Gildea, The Irish Times

‘[Noorali] captures the way in which office life in all its smallness – the clicking, the chair-swivelling, the typing, the chatting – takes on an outsized place in our lives, the way in which it bleeds into our sense of self… a straightforward, wry and intelligent voice.’ – John Rattray, Review 31

In a surreal and hilarious mix of fiction and autobiography, The Kingdom follows a host of misfits and losers struggling to devote themselves to the religion of the 21st century: work. Set predominantly within the admin office of an NHS liver wing, the collection chronicles the strange behaviours of men cornered by a bureaucracy that lets indignity run rampant.

But before I heeded the call of accountancy, I needed to completely rule out the possibility I might be Philip Roth. My wife and I had agreed I’d admit defeat after four more years of clicking. Then, adequately crushed, my real life could commence. Until then, I’d open my novel in a tiny window in the bottom right-hand corner of my computer screen, the rest occupied by images from a stranger’s MRI, and write.

Yoel Noorali is a former NHS administrator and writer of fiction and non-fiction living in London. His short stories have appeared in Back Patio, Dispatches, The Fence, Neutral Spaces, and Somesuch, and his essays in Esquire, The Financial Times, The Observer and The Spectator.

The Kingdom is the first title in the New Writing Series from Book Works – publishing outside the mainstream.