Fulfillment
LEE COLE
(FABER, 336 PP, £18.99)
TABLET BOOKSHOP PRICE £17.09 • TEL 020 7799 4064
Emmett, an aspiring screenwriter, works in a fulfillment and distribution centre in Kentucky. It’s a vast maze of conveyor belts, in an area where “there had once been coalmines and tobacco stemmeries, auto plants and grist mills”, and Emmett feels something like awe at its “hungry labyrinth”.
Lee Cole’s captivating second novel covers similar territory to his first, Groundskeeping (2016), also set in rural Kentucky where, like Emmett, the working-class narrator wants to be a writer, and where familial despair and the culture wars of a divided America form a thrumming backdrop.
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