‘Terrific. So funny’ Zadie Smith
‘Monstrously depressing but so comic and well observed that I didn’t really mind …. It is great’ Dolly Alderton
‘A dark comedy of female rage’ Catherine Lacey
‘Brilliant. For fans of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation’ Pandora Sykes
‘Funny, shocking, clever, and hugely entertaining’ Roddy Doyle
‘A definitive work of milennial literature’ Jia Tolentino
‘The best thing I’ve read in years’ Emma Jane Unsworth
‘Vicious … hilariously spot on’ Guardian
In a windowless office, a woman explains something from her real, nonwork life – about the frustration and indignity of returning her online shopping – to her colleagues. One wears a topknot. Another checks her pedometer.
Watching them all is Millie. Thirty-years-old and an eternal temp, she says almost nothing, almost all of the time.
But then the possibility of a permanent job arises. Will it bring the new life Millie is envisioning – one involving a gym membership, a book club, and a lot less beer and TV – finally within reach? Or will it reveal just how hollow that vision has become?
‘Made me laugh and cry enough times to feel completely reborn’ The Paris Review
‘A definite work of millennial literature. Wretchedly riveting, with the sick, obsessive pleasure of looking under a bandage at a wound’ The New Yorker
‘So darkly funny and acutely observed that it feels like a documentary’ Andrew McMillan
‘Anyone who has ever felt like their life is going nowhere – and to make it worse, going nowhere in an achingly slow manner – will recognize themselves’ Nylon
‘Monstrously depressing but so comic and well observed that I didn’t really mind …. It is great’ Dolly Alderton
‘A dark comedy of female rage’ Catherine Lacey
‘Brilliant. For fans of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation’ Pandora Sykes
‘Funny, shocking, clever, and hugely entertaining’ Roddy Doyle
‘A definitive work of milennial literature’ Jia Tolentino
‘The best thing I’ve read in years’ Emma Jane Unsworth
‘Vicious … hilariously spot on’ Guardian
In a windowless office, a woman explains something from her real, nonwork life – about the frustration and indignity of returning her online shopping – to her colleagues. One wears a topknot. Another checks her pedometer.
Watching them all is Millie. Thirty-years-old and an eternal temp, she says almost nothing, almost all of the time.
But then the possibility of a permanent job arises. Will it bring the new life Millie is envisioning – one involving a gym membership, a book club, and a lot less beer and TV – finally within reach? Or will it reveal just how hollow that vision has become?
‘Made me laugh and cry enough times to feel completely reborn’ The Paris Review
‘A definite work of millennial literature. Wretchedly riveting, with the sick, obsessive pleasure of looking under a bandage at a wound’ The New Yorker
‘So darkly funny and acutely observed that it feels like a documentary’ Andrew McMillan
‘Anyone who has ever felt like their life is going nowhere – and to make it worse, going nowhere in an achingly slow manner – will recognize themselves’ Nylon
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Reviews
Halle Butler is a first-rate satirist of the horror show being sold to us as Modern Femininity. She is Thomas Bernhard in a bad mood, wearing ill-fitting tights, scrutinizing old take-out leftovers. THE NEW ME shows us the futility of betterment in an increasingly paranoid era of self-improvement, one in which the female body is grated into little bloody empowered bits of itself. A dark comedy of female rage. Fucking hilarious.
Brilliant. For fans of Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation
The New Me is a pitch-black and wickedly funny take on millennial work culture and the lie of self-improvement. I loved it.
Halle Butler has a way of looking at our 21st-century neoliberalist condition that simultaneously exposes its brutality and renders that same brutality absurd, hilarious, fizzy with humor. She's an incisive, curmudgeonly bard of the uniquely precarious times we live in, and it is crucial that you read her immediately.
A deliciously dark satire of office life
A cringey book about someone's shitty life that makes you feel infinitely better about your own
It's terrific. So funny.
A bleak and brutal book that exposes a nearly unbearable futility to life in the workforce, not to mention life outside of it. Butler's vision is funny and raw and dark-a cautionary tale, hilarious and intimate, against growing up and making do.
Monstrously depressing but so comic and well observed that I didn't really mind ... It is great
A novel so darkly funny and acutely observed that it feels like a documentary; a state-of-the-nation book about the Millenial condition
Anyone who has ever felt like their life is going nowhere - and to make it worse, going nowhere in an achingly slow manner - will recognize themselves
Painfully and hilariously socially astute. Sometimes I wasn't sure if I was crying with laughter or just sympathetic misanthropy. Millie is caustically funny, obstructively depressive and self-consciously complicit in an endless mise en abyme of utter vapidity and I am absolutely in love with her.
Halle Butler's slim, acrid novel is a pleasingly cruel glimpse at the world of work and temping.
The best thing I've read in years. A dark delight. Viciously funny. Brilliantly subversive.
Vicious ... hilariously spot on
wake up, look in the mirror, swear it will all be different today. sound familiar? here's that feeling in novel form: meet millie, a 30-year-old flailing around in dissatisfaction. a job offer seems to promise reinvention-but, sadly, easy transformations are for caterpillars, not lonely, anxiety-ridden women
A definitive work of millennial literature
Made me laugh and cry enough times to feel completely reborn
THE NEW ME renders contemporary American life in such vivid, stinging color, that certain sentences are liable to give the reader a paper cut. But you'll want to keep on reading anyway. Halle Butler is terrific, and I loved this book.
Funny, shocking, clever, and hugely entertaining
A bouncy, profane, highly addictive novel about work, female friendship, and other alienations. Halle Butler's insane talent shimmers on every page of this deadpan misanthrope's ode. A must-read!