See What You Notice

The most important thing in the store isn't for sale.

Alex Turner is $16,737 in debt the morning he drives his dead father's car to a new store. His girlfriend is gone. His own car was repossessed. And in the glove compartment, he finds a notebook his father kept — and one line he can't shake: Too busy fighting. Love him. Don't know how to say it right.

On his first day at the Buffalo store, his new boss hands him a nearly identical notebook and says, See what you notice.

Over the next six months, inside the over-lit aisles of a store the world walks past without a thought, Alex begins to see the life he's actually in — the people he's misread, the fear he's been running from since he was a kid, and a boss whose quiet steadiness he doesn't yet understand. A man who is running out of time.

A warm, quietly devastating debut about the working lives most novels overlook — and the moment you stop bracing against your life and start living it.

For readers of Fredrik Backman and Matt Haig.