In The Kingdom, Yoel Noorali captures the strange essence of the kind of 21st-century work that takes place in airless offices and on spreadsheets without a clear reason for its significance. Across eight short stories and the titular three-chapter account of his life in NHS admin, he finds a tone that complements his topic. ‘We didn’t need to understand the words we clicked: we just had to click the words,’ explains a version of the author in ‘The Kingdom’, capturing how mundanity breeds absurdity. 

The collection’s soft body horror makes for an odd but effective comedy. Noorali wonders whether the hospital really needs ‘whole humans’ to do the admin: ‘The left index finger accomplished everything necessary.’ The influence of Lars von Trier and Tómas Gislason’s television series The Kingdom is clear from the title and hospital setting, as well as the darkly comic scenes, including one in which a biopsied liver is thrown about in an envelope like junk mail. 

Noorali doesn’t just focus on NHS mania. In ‘Car Park B’, for example, a man is stuck in an impossible loop while trying to park. His car runs out of petrol but ‘through a chance topographical anomaly’ he is forced to ‘circle the car park for eternity’, missing a job