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A Working Title I Want to Change

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In the labyrinth of Tesco’s flagship supermarket, precariously employed workers search for dignity at the margins of late-capitalist London, while a nameless narrator cycles through the discarded nametags of sacked colleagues. Gradually absorbing their stories, he drifts from shifts at the superstore to temporary accommodation, as imminent homelessness threatens his intellectual hopes. Petty triumphs, quiet humiliations, and fleeting acts of kindness become markers of resistance to the wider collapse beyond the store’s walls.

A Working Title I Want to Change explores the dizzyingly over-lit world of austerity Britain, revealing consumerism’s rituals and illusions in all their comedy and menace.

by: Saul Leslie

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Saul Leslie

Saul Leslie is a writer and academic in Liverpool. He teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Liverpool and Hope University. His fiction has been published by Bloomsbury and Liverpool University Press, and his remarks about disability and literature have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, The Conversation, and The Poetry Review. His academic research on disability and employment was instrumental in influencing policy that brought about the British Sign Language Act in 2022. In addition to his PhD research on disability and the workplace, he also works with Penguin-Random House as an editor of disabled writers’ memoirs and novels.

Paperback with free eBook9781917516235

EBook9781917516242

Number of pages368

Sophie Sleigh-Johnson, author of Code: Damp

Saul Leslie has divined the deflating end point of Bataille’s unproductive expenditure in the abandoned shopping trolley, stuck in the mire halfway between damp valediction and the base matter of bureaucratic Albion. A sacred conspiracy of consumer ennui, scried in his mordant sweep round its British aisles.

Matthew Beaumont, author of Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London

I’m all lost in the supermarket, Joe Strummer sang half a century ago… Saul Leslie’s inventive, perceptive novel is a sharply funny but also often poignant social satire centred on the precarious existence of someone who, despite his intellectual aspirations, is condemned by the contemporary capitalist economy to stack supermarket shelves and surf the sofas of those only marginally more fortunate than him. Full of revealing observations about metropolitan life in the early twenty-first century, it is written in exuberant, richly enjoyable prose.

Sheila Liming, author of Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time

Lovely, clever, both incredibly silly at points and also deadly, heartbreakingly serious. There are some really shattering and delicately drawn insights to be found about class, the nature of work, and the dream of upward mobility. I saw flashes of other texts, like Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and Hamsun’s Hunger… there is a similar spirit of desperation mixed with ribaldry, of bleakness that gets rounded out, at points, by humor.

Dan Evans, author of A Nation of Shopkeepers

Finally: the great supermarket novel. A wickedly sharp tale of work and life under modern capitalism that will resonate with anyone who has ever worked on the tills.

Philip Hoare, author of William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love

Where do we, how do we navigate this artifice of the future world we’re in? Saul Leslie lays it out, like an 18th-century progress, in all its sensate, surreal, abusive detail, the way we are forced to live our lives, seen through screens, felt through words and bodies, told back to us in visceral media, sold back to us in turn. Imagine Charles Bukowski rewritten by John Milton and James Joyce for a post-pop cultural age. This is exciting, fearsomely brilliant and witty writing — a stunning and engrossing fictional debut, a brilliant head-rush — and it never gives in.