Then We Came to the End is the first novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 by Joshua Ferris

Joshua Ferris

Joshua Ferris is an American author best known for his debut 2007 novel Then We Came to the End. The book is a comedy about the American workplace, told in the first-person plural...

. It was released by Little, Brown and Company

Little, Brown and Company

Little, Brown and Company is a publishing house established by Charles Coffin Little and his partner, James Brown. Since 2006 it has been a constituent unit of Hachette Book Group USA.-19th century:...

 on March 1, 2007. A satire of the American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 workplace, it is similar in tone to Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo is an American author, playwright, and occasional essayist whose work paints a detailed portrait of American life in the late 20th and early 21st centuries...

's Americana

Americana (novel)

Americana is Don DeLillo's first novel, published in 1971. In 1989, DeLillo revised the text, excising several pages from the original.-Plot summary:The book is narrated by David Bell, a former television executive turned avant-garde filmmaker...

, even borrowing DeLillo's first line for its title.

It takes place in a Chicago

Chicago

Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...

 advertising agency

Advertising agency

An advertising agency or ad agency is a service business dedicated to creating, planning and handling advertising for its clients. An ad agency is independent from the client and provides an outside point of view to the effort of selling the client's products or services...

 that is experiencing a downturn at the end of the 1990s Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

 boom. Ferris employs a first-person-plural narrative.

Critical reaction

The book was greeted with positive reviews from GQ, The New Yorker

The New Yorker

The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...

, Esquire

Esquire (magazine)

Esquire is a men's magazine, published in the U.S. by the Hearst Corporation. Founded in 1932, it flourished during the Great Depression under the guidance of founder and editor Arnold Gingrich.-History:...

, and Slate

Slate (magazine)

Slate is a US-based English language online current affairs and culture magazine created in 1996 by former New Republic editor Michael Kinsley, initially under the ownership of Microsoft as part of MSN. On 21 December 2004 it was purchased by the Washington Post Company...

. The book was named one of the Best Books of 2007 by The New York Times

The New York Times

The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

.

Time

Time (magazine)

Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...

magazine's Lev Grossman named it one of the Top 10 Fiction Books of 2007, ranking it at #2.

The book also won the PEN/Hemingway Award for best first novel.