Cleaner

(Hardback)

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Description

'I clean the offices and bathrooms and lobby five nights a week, but my actual job is to take care of everyone. They need so much help.'

At night, in a corporate office block in an unnamed metropolitan city, a cleaner begins her shift.

As she cleans Sad Intern's desk, she throws away some of her more alarming health supplements, and leaves her healthy snacks instead. Mr Buff's desk is immaculate, but he seems to have a secret smoking habit - not conducive to his fitness journey - which she's going to help him kick. She confiscates the knitted coaster that attractive, sensitive Yarn Guy has given to Cola Woman - someone who clips her nails in the office doesn't deserve his gifts.

But tonight, while scrolling through your emails, she'll discover the secret you've been hiding - the one that will threaten her job, and the jobs of everyone she takes care of. And you're about to find out that, sometimes, your most powerful enemy is the one you don't even see.

Reviews

Brandi Wells's Cleaner is a sharp and toothy portrait of a life devoted to the convenience of others. Told through the perspective of an acerbic and lovingly conniving night-shift cleaner, Cleaner skillfully satirizes the work-place novel, offering cutting insights on the hypocrisy and empty ambitions of grind culture, where friendship takes the form of alliance and love seems an impossible task. Wells's narrator embodies that most confounding human contradiction: the desire for closeness, the impulse to push it away. -- Isle McElroy, author of PEOPLE COLLIDE and THE ATMOSPHERIANS

Author Bio

Brandi Wells is the author of a novella, This Boring Apocalypse (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2015) and Please Don't be Upset (Tiny Hardcore Press, 2011). They have an MFA in creative writing from the University of Alabama and are a Phd candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California.