- Published: 15 January 2015
- ISBN: 9781781090244
- Imprint: Hogarth
- Format: Hardback
- Pages: 176
- RRP: $39.99
The Room
- Published: 15 January 2015
- ISBN: 9781781090244
- Imprint: Hogarth
- Format: Hardback
- Pages: 176
- RRP: $39.99
Kafkaesque
Lady
A gripping, tense, demonic fable in which the unease is precision-tooled and the turns of the screw wholly unexpected.
Neel Mukherjee
The Room is the most effective chapbook on workplace comportment since Glengarry Glen Ross. Hats off!
Nick Offerman, Ron Swanson in Parks and Recreation
A brief but brilliant tale
Stephanie Boland, Financial Times
The Room deftly creates an intense mood that remains unbroken for the short, enjoyable period this novella takes to read
Jane Graham, Big Issue
Thoroughly enjoyable… If you read only one novel by a famous Swedish actor translated into English this year, make it The Room
Ian Sansom, Guardian
Witty, clever, quite possibly brilliant
Sunday Sport
Kafka meets The Office in this hilarious and chilling Swedish fable of workplace politics
Kate Saunders, The Times
brilliantly deadpan...often very funny
Eileen Battersby, Irish Times
surreal, funny and unsettling
Arifa Akbar, The Independent
The novel works both as a glorious satire of the modern workplace and as a psychological drama played through the eyes of Bjorn, a pedantic and thoroughly unreliable narrator. As entertaining as it is disturbing to be in his mind, I was both intrigued and entertained.
Fanny Blake, Daily Mail
It’s a brilliant nightmare with a terrific ending
Theo Hopper, Big Issue
This is a very funny book about a magical room, but it is also a familiar, humane story about alienation and intolerance, set during a bleak Swedish winter
Jonathan McAloon, The Times Literary Supplement
For all its sinister Kafkaesque traits, Jonas Karlsson’s The Room…packs several hilarious punches.
Ann Morgan
A Beckettian drama in an open plan office
Il Giornale (Italy)
The Room is partly disturbing, partially very funny ... Jonas Karlsson masterfully tells us about his main character's Kafkaesque adventure
Panorama (Italy)
Minimalism and surrealism, bundled in a short but powerful novel by Jonas Karlsson, one of Sweden's most successful authors of the moment
DeZondag (Netherlands)
The Room is a contemporary version of The Trial by Franz Kafka: the same alienating and disruptive bureaucratic environment and the same hopeless struggle of the individual in the large, historically evolved system
DeMorgen (Netherlands)
A flawless novella that you will finish with a smile
Knack (Netherlands)