Help Wanted by Adelle Waldman

The events in Adelle Waldman’s fleet-footed novel, Help Wanted (Norton), take place at a box store of declining fortunes in upstate New York—a setting that in Waldman’s steady hands proves to be a crucible of ambition and survival. We are with Movement, the corporatized name given to the employees who show up at 4 a.m. to unload trucks full of household goods and move them to the retail floor. Waldman is unsentimental about her low-wage protagonists, investing them with foibles as well as everyday heroism, and she’s mesmerizing on the details of their work, the mechanical belts, the “throwing” of boxes, the meticulous unpacking. A single paragraph on the difficulty of untangling bras has thrilling specificity. In their petty and casually unempathetic supervisor, Meredith, the novel finds its engine of suspense, a middle-management villain whose team comes to believe must be promoted to be vanquished. —Taylor Antrim