Who Moved My Blackberry? by Lucy Kellaway, Martin Lukes (With)

From the Publisher

Martin Lukes is a superstar at the office and at home—just ask him. Blessed with an ego the size of Mount Everest and virtually no sense of self, he blusters through life with cheerful obliviousness. Who Moved My BlackBerry™? is the uproarious e-epistolary story of one spectacularly bad year in his life, during which Martin hires an executive coach to help him achieve "22.5 percent better than my bestest," only to inadvertently insult his new boss, watch his wife get a job that threatens to eclipse his own, and allow his BlackBerry™—complete with racy e-mails to his secretary/lover—to fall into the hands of his juvenile delinquent son. This novel is set in an office so dysfunctional, it's bound to strike a chord with any nine-to-fiver. Comic schadenfreude at its best!

Lucy Kellaway is a regular columnist at the Financial Times of London. She created the character Martin Lukes in that column, the Financial Times' most popular.

The New York Times - Ana Marie Cox

Who Moved My BlackBerry? is not art. Those in search of a book that gets to the human cost and comedy of modern technology as White Noise or The Corrections did will not find it in the small-screen antics of Martin Lukes. Kellaway's book is a snapshot, a lot of clever messages that ultimately point at their own absurdity. Then again, perhaps that's the idea. Her frenetic yet motionless characters reflect the irony of BlackBerryed life: It only looks as if you're busy.

Kirkus Reviews

British journalist Kellaway moves into fiction with a novel featuring the marketing executive she created for her Financial Times column. Martin Lukes fancies himself an out-of-the-box thinker at his global marketing firm and quite the family man at home. He loves his email, which he uses to boss around his staff, to brag about jobs he has no chance of getting, to flirt with his silly new secretary, to scold his wife for not understanding the scope of his commitments, to connect with the two sons he never sees and, most importantly, to communicate with Pandora. She's his guru at CoachworX!, where Martin has signed up for the Executive Bronze Life Coaching Program (his company's finance director wouldn't approve the platinum one). Her coaching will help him be "better than your very best," Pandora promises. Despite his personal commitment to become more introspective, and his boasts of being a team player, Martin's emails-which constitute the novel's entire text-reveal a man woefully inept at human relations. By the time he launches a steamy affair with "Kinky Pinky," his young secretary, Martin has cluelessly angered most of his family and coworkers with his empty promises. The one area in which he seems to excel is in making up words for marketing purposes, such as "creovation" (a hybrid of creative and innovation). Martin's self-important emails are delightfully droll, and the tale becomes all the more entertaining when his angry teenaged son gets hold of Martin's BlackBerry and proceeds to wreak havoc on his neglectful father's life. Enjoyable satire of corporate life's stupidities and empty language, as well as those who buy into them.

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