Award-winning Brooklyn writer to launch debut novel in Cobble Hill, Fort Greene
Brooklyn BookBeat
Award-winning Brooklyn writer Helen Phillips will soon release “The Beautiful Bureaucrat” (Henry Holt; on sale Aug. 11) — a book that traces the story of Josephine, a newly married young woman who is relieved to finally have a job after a long period of unemployment and a string of bad luck.
In a windowless building in an isolated part of town, under the watchful eyes of her sinister boss, Josephine inputs an endless string of seemingly meaningless numbers into something known only as The Database. She’s hesitant to question the source of her newfound employment, but as the days inch by and the files stack up, Josephine feels increasingly anxious in her surroundings — the office’s scarred pink walls take on a living quality, the drone of keyboards echoes eerily down the long empty hallways.
Then, when her husband Joseph begins to disappear for days at a time with no explanation, Josephine’s creeping unease shifts decidedly to dread. She attempts to control her paranoia while the haunting truth about her work begins to take shape in her mind. She realizes that in order to save those she holds most dear, she must penetrate a labyrinthine bureaucracy whose tentacles seem to extend to every corner of the city and beyond.