The Office as a Boat

‘In the office you have to leave your dreaming behind, and live in the front of the head where all the analysis is done, where the facts of history are plotted, where logic operates, where emotion is scantily represented.’

An unending heatwave heightens the strange claustrophobia of the nine to five. Lou, Sarah, Verity, Susan, Casey, Isabel, Nell and Audrey all work together; they know the intimate details of each other’s lives, but also nothing at all. They are co-conspirators and competitors, support network and enemies. They track the moods of the men in charge on a menstrual chart while dreaming of escaping to their gardens.

In Moya Costello’s incisive and dreamlike prose, The Office as a Boat, first published in 2000, provides a deadpan field study of working days – with their gossip, banality and missing stationery – while suggesting the possibility of breaking free. This new edition, with an introduction by bestselling author Holly Gramazio, makes for a quirky and very funny desk companion.

‘A joy.’ The Canberra Times

‘Beautifully clear and visually precise.' Katharine England, The Advertiser

‘There is wit, irony and comedy in the writing, and also an assured seriousness and high intelligence.’ The Age

‘Recodes the banal as sublime … delightful, provocative, funny.’ Jen Webb, Idiom

‘Costello slips easefully from slice-of-life realist prose to magic realism, from social history to imaginative fancy.’ Imago

Moya Costello wrote five books – two of short creative prose (Kites in Jakarta and Small Ecstasies), two short novels (The Office as a Boat and Harriet Chandler) and one collection of prose poems (pressed specimens) – and many, many pieces, published in journals, anthologies, newspapers and catalogues. Moya was a Sydney girl but also sampled life in Melbourne, Adelaide, Northern Rivers and Tasmania. She died in 2025.

Holly Gramazio is a game designer, curator and writer, originally from Adelaide and currently based in London. Her first novel, The Husbands, was an international bestseller and is being adapted into a series by Apple TV.

If you enjoyed The Office as a Boat, we suggest:

• Seeking out other books with a Greek chorus, like Dirt Town by Hayley Scrivenor, The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood or The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

• Finding work wives in unlikely places, such as Sick Note by Olivia De Zilva, Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata and maybe even Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber

• Immersing yourself in the under-appreciated genre of publishing-house lit: The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris and Luster by Raven Leilani, not to mention Bridget Jones’s Diary‍

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