Seven top workplace novels

Lorna Graham was born in the San Francisco Bay Area and graduated from Barnard College. She has written for Good Morning America and Dateline NBC. She also wrote a short film, "A Timeless Call," honoring America's military veterans, that was directed by Steven Spielberg. She lives in Greenwich Village.

Graham's new novel is Where You Once Belonged.

At Lit Hub she tagged seven top novels on the workplace, including:

Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry

Bonnie Garmus’ Lessons in Chemistry, also a bestseller, offers a look at women in two workplaces. Rather than an emphasis on collective action, however, this novel lionizes the individual woman with pluck.

In the 1950s, Elizabeth Zott is a budding but beleaguered chemist at Hastings Research Institute in California. She is an experiment her boss has no intention of allowing to become successful:

Meyers was…famous for being a lecher…. But Elizabeth did not leave—she couldn’t, she needed the Master’s. So she endured the day-to-day degradations…. Until the day he called her into his office, ostensibly to talk about her admittance to his doctoral program, but instead shoving his hand up her skirt. Furious, she forcibly removed it, then threatened to report him. “To whom?” he laughed.

A twist of fate later and Elizabeth is hosting a TV cooking show, which should be far friendlier ground, and it is—except that she’s still patronized. In both work environments, she sticks it to the patriarchy: with smarts, grit, a sharpened No. 2 pencil in one case and in another, a chef’s knife.

Author Garmus may not have written Chemistry with the hope of changing readers’ lives, but, as she told The New York Times, it’s done just that: “People have quit their jobs and gone back to school…because they recognize themselves,” Garmus said.

Read about another entry on the list.

Lessons in Chemistry is among Claire Alexander's five books to read for when you’re lonely.

--Marshal Zeringue