Jillian

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Audiobook Downloadable / ISBN-13: 9781474618953

Price: £19.99

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Twenty-four-year-old Megan may have her whole life ahead of her, but it already feels like a dead end, thanks to her dreadful job as a gastroenterologist’s receptionist and her heart-clogging resentment of the success and happiness of everyone around her. But no one stokes Megan’s bitterness quite like her coworker, Jillian, a grotesquely optimistic, thirty-five-year-old single mother whose chirpy positivity obscures her mounting struggles.

Megan and Jillian’s lives become increasingly precarious as their faulty coping mechanisms–denial, self-help books, alcohol, religion, prescription painkillers, obsessive criticism, alienated boyfriends, and, in Jillian’s case, the misguided purchase of a dog–send them spiraling toward their downfalls. Wickedly authentic and brutally funny, Jillian is a subversive portrait of two women trapped in cycles of self-delusion and self-destruction, each more like the other than they would care to admit.

Reviews

The feel-bad book of the year ... sublimely awkward and hilarious
Chicago Tribune
A master of writing about work and its discontents
The Millions
Wretchedly riveting
Jia Tolentino, New Yorker
Butler is an extremely sharp-eyed satirist, and the books are very funny, especially on the deadening banalities of office life
Alex Clark, Guardian
Few authors capture the acidic angst of downtrodden millennials like Butler
The Huffington Post
Outrageous and amusing ... reads like rubbernecking or a junk-food binge, compelling a horrified fascination and bleak laughter
Kirkus
Butler is an essential contemporary voice
Literary Hub
The funniest book I've read in a long time, but also one of the most important ones
The Rumpus