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Summary
Julia has landed a fresh start as a chef at an up-and-coming city restaurant.
Her ex-boyfriend, Nick, is flirting with sobriety and nobody else.
Life should have started to take shape by now, but instead they’re trying to make new versions of themselves, searching for a good answer to the question: ‘What do you do?’
‘A superb writer, by turns funny, graceful, acidly cynical, lyrical’ Guardian
‘An exhilarating and beautiful book by an extraordinarily gifted writer.’ Sally Rooney
‘If you’ve been waiting for someone to close the gap on social distancing, to capture the furtive problems of social media, to make you laugh at your own alienation, to wrap your mind around the narcissism of small differences, then Calder is your new best friend, and his debut collection is the must-read book of the year.’ Andrew O’Hagan
‘Remarkably fresh . . . Calder’s writing achieves that rare thing of capturing how it feels to be young.’ Esquire
JemCalder
Jem Calder was born in Cambridge, and lives and works in London. His fiction has been published in The Stinging Fly and Granta, and his debut short story collection, Reward System, was published by Faber in 2022.
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Jem Calder, author of the ‘exhilarating and beautiful’ (Sally Rooney) collection of short fictions, Reward System, shares five of his …