Author(s): Hilary Leichter

Fiction | Staff Favourites | Mel M's Book Talkers

18 boyfriends. 23 jobs. One ghost who occasionally pops in to give advice. Welcome to the world of the Temporary. 'There is nothing more personal than doing your job'. So goes the motto of the Temporary, as she takes job after job, in search of steadiness, belonging, and something to call her own. Aided by her bespoke agency and a cast of boyfriends - each allotted their own task (the handy boyfriend, the culinary boyfriend, the real estate boyfriend) - she is happy to fill in for any of us: for the Chairman of the Board, a ghost, a murderer, a mother. Even for you, and for me. Wild, hopeful, infinitely sad and infinitely funny, Temporary is the smartest, most humane story of what it is to work and live, here and now.

CONSTANT READER STAFF REVIEW - MEL M

TEMPORARY is a wonderfully warm and weird little novel in a sort of magical realist Douglas Adams-esque mode (I don’t know what genre this actually is and that’s fine!) but which runs tightly parallel to our own reality, like a surreal nervous system laid over and under our capitalist society.

The narrator has about 18 boyfriends and cycles through absurd jobs like a plastic bag on the breeze. At one point she even fills in for a house ghost! That’s just the kind of book this is, frankly.

Someone on Goodreads described this as “A Series of Unfortunate Events, set in the gig economy, then doused with equal parts magic and jet fuel” and I couldn’t agree more.

If you have worked odd jobs before, you will find yourself in this novel as if in a funhouse mirror. Good stuff, very funny, oddly tender, highly recommend!