The Room

Kafkaesque

Lady

A gripping, tense, demonic fable in which the unease is precision-tooled and the turns of the screw wholly unexpected.

Neel Mukherjee

The Room is the most effective chapbook on workplace comportment since Glengarry Glen Ross. Hats off!

Nick Offerman, Ron Swanson in Parks and Recreation

A brief but brilliant tale

Stephanie Boland, Financial Times

The Room deftly creates an intense mood that remains unbroken for the short, enjoyable period this novella takes to read

Jane Graham, Big Issue

Thoroughly enjoyable… If you read only one novel by a famous Swedish actor translated into English this year, make it The Room

Ian Sansom, Guardian

Witty, clever, quite possibly brilliant

Sunday Sport

Kafka meets The Office in this hilarious and chilling Swedish fable of workplace politics

Kate Saunders, The Times

brilliantly deadpan...often very funny

Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

surreal, funny and unsettling

Arifa Akbar, The Independent

The novel works both as a glorious satire of the modern workplace and as a psychological drama played through the eyes of Bjorn, a pedantic and thoroughly unreliable narrator. As entertaining as it is disturbing to be in his mind, I was both intrigued and entertained.

Fanny Blake, Daily Mail

It’s a brilliant nightmare with a terrific ending

Theo Hopper, Big Issue

This is a very funny book about a magical room, but it is also a familiar, humane story about alienation and intolerance, set during a bleak Swedish winter

Jonathan McAloon, The Times Literary Supplement

For all its sinister Kafkaesque traits, Jonas Karlsson’s The Room…packs several hilarious punches.

Ann Morgan

The Room is a contemporary version of The Trial by Franz Kafka: the same alienating and disruptive bureaucratic environment and the same hopeless struggle of the individual in the large, historically evolved system

DeMorgen (Netherlands)

The Room is partly disturbing, partially very funny ... Jonas Karlsson masterfully tells us about his main character's Kafkaesque adventure

Panorama (Italy)

A Beckettian drama in an open plan office

Il Giornale (Italy)

A flawless novella that you will finish with a smile

Knack (Netherlands)

Minimalism and surrealism, bundled in a short but powerful novel by Jonas Karlsson, one of Sweden's most successful authors of the moment

DeZondag (Netherlands)