If you’ve been bullied at work, this is your story!
My new novel, The War on Sarah Morris, is fiction. And it’s also non-fiction. It deals with the real world, the world that you and I live in, a world that’s often harsh and unstable and unfriendly to a lot of working people.
On the surface, the central character, Sarah Morris, seems to have plenty of advantages: she’s middle-class, educated, employed in a professional job—she’s an editor at a book publishing company in Toronto—married, living in a swanky downtown condo. But when Sarah’s company, Quill Pen Press reorganizes in the wake of the 2008 recession, her world starts to crumble. Quill Pen demotes Sarah and most of the other editors at the company, forcing them to spend their days doing menial data entry work instead of editing books. A few months later, Sarah’s co-workers—who are younger than her—leave the company to pursue better opportunities. Alone and without allies, Sarah struggles to stay employed; among other things, she must deal with bullying bosses, backstabbing co-workers, a penny-pinching company. And a number of troubling real-world trends:
- Companies are replacing permanent, stable, middle-class jobs with poorly-paid, unstable contract employment and gig work. Many of these companies—at least before the pandemic—have enjoyed record profits. However, they have replaced countless permanent jobs with benefits with unstable jobs that lack benefits in order to pad their bottom lines. Sarah’s company, overly focused on the bottom line, tries to bully her out of a job without paying her any severance. Likewise, Sarah’s husband Steven, a computer programmer at a major bank, is fired from his job then rehired as a contract worker without the benefits he enjoyed as a bank employee.
- Age bias is prevalent. Middle-aged people, even well-educated people like Sarah, have trouble finding work. Despite her education, experience, and skills, Sarah has a hard time landing a new job because she’s over 50.
- Gender bias is far too common. Sarah loses job opportunities to less qualified and competent male employees. Her female boss, despite her gender, doesn’t like or respect women. Sarah’s male boss also disrespects women. Even worse, he talks down to Sarah and makes phony promises that he doesn’t intend to keep.
- Companies emotionally and psychologically abuse their employees. They demote good employees without cause to save money, make phony promises about job opportunities, dump heavy and unrealistic workloads on people and force them to work overtime without pay. All these nasty things happen to Sarah.
Precarious jobs, age bias, misogyny, bullying, emotional and psychological abuse. Why on earth did I write such an upbeat novel?
I wrote this novel because it’s my own story. And I wanted to tell the truth about the struggles of far too many working warriors in an increasingly cruel and ruthless working world. A lot of non-fiction books deal with this subject, but they’re dominated by cold facts and figures. Hardly any of them deal with the emotional fallout from this hard new world on the real people who work in it.
I hope my novel fills those empty spaces on the bookshelf, And I also hope that the story of a strong woman’s survival in the new tough world of work will inspire other people who are facing the same hardships.
The War on Sarah Morris was published by Legacy Book Press in April 2024. The paperback and ebook are available NOW from Amazon and Goodreads.
Kathleen Jones is a Toronto-based novelist who writes in multiple genres. Her first novel, Love Is the Punch Line, an offbeat, midlife romance set in the world of stand-up comedy, was published by Moonshine Cove in 2018. The book has received a number of favorable 4- and 5-star reviews on Amazon and Goodreads. Kathleen was actively involved in marketing and promoting her novel; among other things, she wrote guest posts for several book-related websites, hosted a book-launch party, was interviewed by a local newspaper (The North York Mirror), convinced several publications and book bloggers (The Midwest Book Review, The San Francisco Review of Books, etc.) to review her novel, conducted ebook giveaways (in return for reviews) on LibraryThing and Goodreads, landed consignment contracts with several local stores, and sold dozens of copies of her novel during book signings at local Indigo and Coles bookstores.
Author site: https://kathleenjones.org/
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/17498110.Kathleen_Jones
LibraryThing: https://www.librarything.com/profile/Kathleen.Jones
Twitter: https://twitter.com/joneslepidas
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kathleen.lepidas
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathleen-jones-lepidas-csc/
