The warehouse : a novel

Title:

Author:

Hart, Rob (Fiction writer), author.

Personal Author:

Hart, Rob (Fiction writer), author.

ISBN:

9781984823793

Edition:

First edition.

Physical Description:

358 pages ; 24 cm

Abstract:

Zinnia never thought she'd be infiltrating Cloud. But now she's undercover, inside the walls, risking it all to ferret out the company's darkest secrets. And Paxton, with his ordinary little hopes and fears? He just might make the perfect pawn--if she can bear to sacrifice him. him.

Subject Term:

Corporations -- Fiction.

Technology -- Fiction.

Undercover operations -- Fiction.

Genre:

Summary:

Holds:

Available:*

Library	Material Type	Shelf Number	Status
Searching... Main Library	Book	FICTION HART	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Main Library	Book	FICTION HART	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Main Library	Book	FICTION HART	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

Cloud isn't just a place to work. It's a place to live. And when you're here, you'll never want to leave.

"A thrilling story of corporate espionage at the highest level . . . and a powerful cautionary tale about technology, runaway capitalism, and the nightmare world we are making for ourselves."--Blake Crouch, New York Times bestselling author of Dark Matter

Film rights sold to Imagine Entertainment for director Ron Howard! * NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Financial Times * Real Simple * Kirkus Reviews

Paxton never thought he'd be working for Cloud, the giant tech company that's eaten much of the American economy. Much less that he'd be moving into one of the company's sprawling live-work facilities.

But compared to what's left outside, Cloud's bland chainstore life of gleaming entertainment halls, open-plan offices, and vast warehouses...well, it doesn't seem so bad. It's more than anyone else is offering.

Zinnia never thought she'd be infiltrating Cloud. But now she's undercover, inside the walls, risking it all to ferret out the company's darkest secrets. And Paxton, with his ordinary little hopes and fears? He just might make the perfect pawn. If she can bear to sacrifice him.

As the truth about Cloud unfolds, Zinnia must gamble everything on a desperate scheme--one that risks both their lives, even as it forces Paxton to question everything about the world he's so carefully assembled here.

Together, they'll learn just how far the company will go...to make the world a better place.

Set in the confines of a corporate panopticon that's at once brilliantly imagined and terrifyingly real, The Warehouse is a near-future thriller about what happens when Big Brother meets Big Business--and who will pay the ultimate price.

Praise for The Warehouse

"A fun, fast-paced read [that] walks a fine line between a near-future thriller and a smart satire . . . makes you wonder if we're already too far into a disastrous future, or if there's still some hope for humanity." --NPR

"I loved The Warehouse, although and because it made my blood run cold. This is what our world could be by this time next year." --S.J. Rozan, Edgar award-winning author of Paper Son

"An inventive, addictive, Crichton-esque, page-turning, near-future dystopian thriller." --Paul Tremblay, Stoker award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghostsof Lock Every Door

Reviews (1)

Kirkus Review

When does the line between utopia and dystopia begin to merge? When you owe your soul to the company store.Hart (Take Out, 2019, etc.) is best known for his private eye novels about Ash McKenna and a novella co-written with James Patterson (Scott Free, 2017), but he's tapped a real vein of the zeitgeist with this stand-alone thriller about the future of work that reads like a combination of Dave Eggers' tech nightmare, The Circle (2013), the public's basic impression of an Amazon fulfillment center, and Parzival's infiltration of IOI in Ready Player One (2011). In the near future, following a series of mass murders at retail outlets, traditional commerce is dead. Every need has been ported over to Cloud, a worldwide fulfillment facility where anyone who wants to survive worksthose who don't either give in eventually or are a customerin something of a feudal society where algorithms decide your role. Cloud is the brainchild of Gibson Wells, a mad genius who is dying of pancreatic cancer but whose role in the story is assured by his broadcasts to his millions of employees. Our two leads are Paxton, a former prison guard whose entrepreneurial invention was co-opted by Cloud and who has reluctantly taken a security job with his enemy's empire, and Zinnia, a secretive operative with deadly skills whose role on the product-picking floor is only a means to an end. While touching on income inequality, drug addiction, and corporate espionage, Hart creates a compelling and intriguing thriller that holds up a black mirror to our own frightening state of affairs. Hart dedicates the book to a real victim, Maria Fernandes, who worked part time at three different jobs and accidentally suffocated on gas fumes while sleeping in her car in 2014. That's a profound inspiration, and Hart has written a hell of a prosecution of modern commerce and the nature of work, all contained in the matrix of a Cory Doctorow-esque postmodern thriller that might not turn out the way you hoped.Part video game, part Sinclair Lewis, part Michael Crichton; it adds up to a terrific puzzle. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.