Would you want to know what your colleagues say behind your back?

Jolene certainly doesn’t.

She’s riddled with anxiety, depressed, and hates her coworkers. The less she knows about them, the better.

So when a catastrophic IT f*ck up grants her access to all of their emails and private messages, she’s initially horrified. The last thing she wants is to be privy to their sad discussions about dying desk plants and marital troubles.

That’s until, with job cuts looming, she realises the power this new-found knowledge gives her.

But as she digs deeper and deeper into the private lives of her colleagues, Jolene uncovers a lot more than she bargained for… And the walls she’d so carefully built start crumbling down.

Natalie Sue’s debut novel, I Hope This Finds You Well enjoyed a lot of pre-publication buzz. It took me a little while to get around to reading it, but I’m happy to report that I really enjoyed this.

The premise of Sue’s novel is an intriguing one: what if you got access to all of your colleagues’ communications? Their emails and their chats. What would you do, if you had access to, functionally, their lives? Jolene is an unhappy admin worker, trudging through every workday, frustrated and irritated by her co-workers. After a cock-up when emailing someone (always be careful when using ninja-text!), a further mistake gives her total access to company communications. What follows is often amusing and witty, but also a very human story.

Hovering over Jolene’s experiences post-access is her past — as a teenager, a tragedy threw her life off-kilter, and she’s still dealing (or not) with the fallout: the guilt, the depression, the fear, and the loneliness that has evolved over time. Her family is there for her, but she’s just not in a place where she can accept the help they are offering (not always perfectly, but they clearly mean well). She finds herself drawn to the new HR rep in the office, struggling to reconcile the actually-helpful and good person with her generally negative impression of people who work in HR. I quickly found myself rooting for them to get together, but Sue doesn’t make it easy on Jolene, but it ultimately feels well-earned.

Ultimately, I Hope This Finds You Well is a very human story. While not the same in structure/approach, I was reminded of Julie Schumacher’s Dear Committee Members and its sequels — the way the author slowly revealed her characters’ inner lives and struggles, and how access to that changes our perceptions and, in some instances, allows for great empathy to develop. We see this evolution in Jolene’s impressions of and interactions with her colleagues: at first, she sees an opportunity to get ahead, to beat her colleagues and benefit herself — to ensure that she is not one of the employees dismissed in the looming waves of layoffs. However, as she consumes more and more of their correspondence, she comes to see them as more three-dimensional, whole people — each with their own struggles, challenges, and weaknesses. It’s a very well-done character evolution.

Jolene finds herself in plenty of amusing situations (including a fake engagement that spirals utterly out of control), and doesn’t always take the high-road when she has the opportunity. But there’s so much more going on that keeps the novel from becoming a workplace farce. The comparison with The Office is sort-of useful, as the novel — like the show — balances the comical with the thoughtful and emotional quite nicely.

I really enjoyed this novel, and I’m certainly looking forward to reading whatever Natalie Sue writes next. (And hopefully we won’t have to wait too long.)

Recommended.

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Natalie Sue’s I Hope This Finds You Well is out now, published by Borough Press (UK) and William Morrow in North America.

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Review copy received via NetGalley