Stephen King meets The Office in the best Literary Fiction out now: THE EXPANSION PROJECT by Ben Pester, WATCHING OVER HER by Jean-Baptiste Andrea, BLOODY AWFUL IN DIFFERENT WAYS by Andrev Walden

Pester’s first novel follows his standout 2021 short story collection, Am I In the Right Place?, in which a series of oddball scenarios rendered corporate work life dystopianly strange.

He follows suit here with the story of a communications officer who loses his eight-year-old daughter in his office after taking her to a Bring Your Child To Work event. It turns out not to be happening and may never even have been scheduled in the first place.

Then colleagues say his daughter was never there . . . but their various testimonies don’t fit together either.

This funny, inventive and unsettling debut has elements of J.G. Ballard as well as Stephen King, plus cringeworthy workplace comedy made familiar by The Office.

In Frank Wynne’s translation from the original French, readers have a chance to enjoy this smash-hit historical epic ahead of the forthcoming film adaptation.

Set in Italy, it centres on the undying love between a downtrodden sculptor, Mimo, and a wealthy aristocrat, Viola. We join Mimo on his deathbed at a monastery before winding back to his birth at the turn of the 20th century to see how he and Viola re-encounter one another over the decades after a romance buffeted by two world wars.

When, in 2023, the novel was awarded the Prix Goncourt – the equivalent of the Booker – there were grumbles it wasn’t literary enough. My guess is the judges were swept along by its timeless narrative gimmicks – who can blame them?

Translated by Ian Giles, this coming-of-age debut was a big seller in Sweden, but it’s a bit of a mixed bag.

Set in the 1980s, it’s about a boy whose put-upon mother pairs up with a succession of terrible partners over seven years.

Each of the seven men gets their own chapter, each named for the quality that strikes the young narrator most: The Thief, The Artist, and so on.

Walden grips your attention with darkly comic verve, and there’s a truly ugly undertow to his portrait of toxic masculinity, rendered all the more shocking by the narrator’s partial understanding.