In her brilliant socio-realist debut, On the Clock, Claire Baglin evokes the everyday clamour of home and work for a French working-class family. This semi-autobiographical novel comprises two alternating narrative strands full of humour and foreboding. Both depict disposable employee culture and patterns of consumption in our increasingly digitised world. 

In one strand, we meet the narrator, Claire, as a child. Her father, Jérôme, is an anxious, hopeful and unfortunate man who places value on what others discard. He clutters their home and imparts the harsh realities of factory work to his family. We are fleetingly introduced to Claire’s mother – who disappears into the necks of her jumpers and the corners of dance floors – and a gulping and gormless scribble of a younger brother. In comparison, Claire is a serious and determined child, nameless and faceless for most of the novel.

In the other strand, Claire takes a summer job at a fast-food restaurant. It is full of hilarious passages describing the minutiae of the service line and the cast of seasonal staff and rabid customers who keep it moving. Claire is swallowed into a strategic relationship with her sardonic manager,