First published 2000
On an ordinary Tuesday, Mr. Phillips goes to work—except he doesn't. Fired the previous week, he dresses for his vanished job and wanders London, inhabiting a liminal space between employment and unemployment. As he moves through the city, fantasizing, observing strangers, and confronting the sudden emptiness of his professional identity, Phillips encounters a series of increasingly strange encounters that challenge his understanding of routine and self. Each interaction—with tube passengers, pornography shop clerks, and random city dwellers—becomes a fragmented exploration of masculinity, work, and middle-class disintegration. Phillips must navigate a day that feels simultaneously mundane and hallucinatory, wrestling with the thin membrane between professional purpose and personal dissolution.
Genres: satire, literary-fiction, contemporary, psychological-thriller
Vibes: atmospheric, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: fish-out-of-water, identity-crisis
Setting: England, London, London (England)
Period: 21st-century
352 pages · Hardcover · Henry Holt and Co.