Coop: A novelette

Lena is a part-time bookseller in a bougie design studio in Oxford Circus. In between minimum-wage work under a politically hostile boss and strained communications with her parents, her days are shaped by a fraught relationship with food, ambiguous experiments in creative writing, and mounting pressure to find a ‘proper’ postgraduate job.

In taut, pocket-sized vignettes, COOP reveals a suffocating lattice of language that makes up a precarious London life. But as each word of her story unravels, Lena discovers interstices between them—to find autonomy and escape.

‘A treasure of a book. Nida Sajid exercises an inventiveness and lightness of touch that transform the daily humiliations of retail work and zero-hour contracts, calorie counting and pompous dates into (to quote Lena quoting Marx) a “coup d’état in miniature” upon the page … this novelette is as bright as it is cutting.’ — Hannah Regel, author of The Last Sane Woman

‘Form and content play off one another in this experimental series of vignettes, which come together to offer a commentary—sardonic yet earnest, poignant yet breezy—on the disjointed anxiety and pervasive sense of loss that mark the times we live in today.’ — Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi, author of The Centre