Reward System

For fans of Patricia Lockwood and Ben Lerner, audacious fictions of a generation wondering: what now?

'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

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?'

'An exhilarating and beautiful book by an extraordinarily gifted writer.' - Sally Rooney

'Remarkably fresh . . . Calder's writing achieves that rare thing of capturing how it feels to be young.' - Esquire

About the Author

Jem Calder was born in Cambridge, and lives and works in London. His fiction has been published in The Stinging Fly and Granta. Reward System is his first book.