Poodle on the Brain

What if the most sensible voice in your head belonged to a poodle?

Christian Schlüter needs a job. What he gets is Pandora, a call centre where nothing quite works the way it should.

The conversations follow absurd scripts. The staff seem increasingly exhausted. A fax machine knows things it has no business knowing. And somewhere behind the open-plan office, a corridor leads to places that should not exist.

Fortunately, Schlüter is not alone.

Living inside his head is Holstein, a white Standard Poodle with impeccable posture, devastating judgement and an aristocratic contempt for almost everyone. From the comfort of his wood-panelled salon, Holstein provides running commentary on Schlüter's failures, his colleagues, corporate bureaucracy and the general decline of civilisation.

Then a colleague disappears.

Her desk vanishes with her. Her name is removed from the system. Everyone insists she was never there.

Everyone except Schlüter.

As Pandora's reality begins to unravel, Schlüter and his unlikely allies follow a trail of impossible records, disconnected fax machines, hidden rooms and doors that refuse to obey geography.

And Holstein, for once, is beginning to take the situation seriously.

Poodle on the Brain is a darkly comic, Kafkaesque novel about call centres, corporate absurdity, loneliness, reality coming apart at the seams and the uncomfortable possibility that the most reasonable person in the room may be an imaginary poodle.

For readers who like surreal workplace fiction, dry humour, bureaucratic nightmares and dogs with an unjustifiably high opinion of themselves.