Discontent by Beatriz Serrano

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Discontent by Beatriz Serrano

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Discontent

Debut

by Beatriz Serrano

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Quick take

Daydreaming about burning your workplace to the ground? Pick up this satirical, cathartic corporate novel instead.

Good to know

  • Illustrated icon, International

    International

  • Illustrated icon, Snarky

    Snarky

  • Illustrated icon, Drugs_and_Alcohol

    Drug & alcohol use

  • Illustrated icon, Under200

    Under 200 pages

Synopsis

On the surface, Marisa’s life looks enviable. She lives in a beautiful apartment in the center of Madrid, she has a hot neighbor who is always around to sleep with her, and she’s rapidly risen through the ranks at an advertising agency. And yet she’s drowning in a dark hole of existential dread induced by the expectations of corporate life. Marisa hates her job and everyone at it. She spends her working hours locked in her office hiding from her coworkers, bingeing YouTube videos, and taking Valium. When she has the time, she escapes to her favorite museum where she contemplates the meaning of human life while staring at Hieronymus Bosch paintings, or trying to get hit by a car so she can go on disability.

But Marisa’s success, which is largely built on lies and work she’s stolen from other people, is in danger of being unraveled when she’s forced to go on her company’s annual team-building retreat. Isolated in the Spanish mountains, surrounded by a psychopathic boss, overly enthusiastic co-workers who revel in their exploitation, a flirty retreat staff, and haunted by a deeply-buried memory about a past coworker, Marisa is pushed to the brink of a complete spiral.

A darkly funny, provocative, and incisive tale of our modern times, Discontent explores the unease we bury eight hours a day, and how explosive it is when it rises to the surface.

Content warning

This books contains mentions of suicide.

Read a sample

Get an early look from the first pages of Discontent.

Discontent

I

For a brief moment back in 2016, the internet’s obsession was the physical and mental well-­being of an En­glish ­YouTuber named Marina Joyce. Joyce was girlish and princesslike, with long blond ringlets and huge blue eyes, who uploaded innocent videos where she tried on pastel-­colored clothes, opened gifts sent to her by different brands, or ate sweets she thought were exotic because they came from Asia. And because the internet’s blurring of boundaries often means you can’t discern whether you are viewing erotic content or family content (or, perhaps, both at the same time), a widely disparate community followed her—­from little girls who wanted to wear the same pink dresses to bald men in their fifties who probably masturbated to videos of her eating ice cream.

But after a while, her followers began detecting subtle changes in her behavior. In one of her videos, Marina Joyce was at a party, smiling at the camera and showing off her outfit, but something in the way she walked around (languid and listless) or the way she responded to questions (taking about three seconds too long to grasp them) set off all the alarms. This gave rise to a conspiracy theory, according to which Joyce had been kidnapped by her boyfriend or by a cult (it was unclear which) and was being abused and forced to upload videos against her will.

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Why we chose it...


The biting narrative voice feels sharply representative of the present moment—it’s internet-literate and not afraid to be provocative.


This book so perfectly captures the ethos of a burned-out corporate office worker that it’s almost uncomfortable to read.


It’s an incisive novel in translation that’s both globally resonant and sharply specific.

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Debut authors
View all
Lessons in Chemistry
Count My Lies
On The Clock
Penitence
Passion Project
Black Cake
Ink Blood Sister Scribe
Dirty Diana
Liquid
Honey
The Road of Bones
More
Wedding Dashers
Shark Heart
Spitting Gold
The Maid
Weyward
The Sun Was Electric Light
All We Were Promised
The House of My Mother
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The Bright Years
Among Friends
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The Bombshell
You Between the Lines
Alive Day
Crying in H Mart
A Thousand Times Before
Maggie; or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar
Ariadne
Silver Elite
Lunar Love
Aftertaste
The Collected Regrets of Clover
The Days I Loved You Most
The Wives
Adelaide
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A Flicker in the Dark
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The Storm We Made
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You, Again
The Love Hypothesis
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