Office of lies
Every office has its politics. But some offices have something worse. Five people who are perfectly pleasant to each other's faces and perfectly dangerous behind each other's backs.
On the third floor of a building on Cairo Road in Lusaka, five colleagues in the Finance and Administration department of Kamwalu General Supplies share a room, a team, and a set of daily courtesies that look, from the outside, like friendship. Sinyangwe, the confident senior officer who needs to be the man who knows things. Wamunyima, the sharp procurement officer who observes everything and says just enough. Hamataya, the steady, cheerful colleague who lets resentments collect until they overflow. Mutalu, the perceptive, warm-hearted woman whose care for people has a private agenda underneath it. And Tililenji, who thinks she is careful, until the year proves otherwise.
What binds them is not affection. It is gossip - small, casual, well-intentioned, devastating. A story about a colleague's wife that is not quite what was seen. A rumour about a new car that becomes an accusation of theft. A lie about a contract renewal told to someone who was supposed to be a friend. A promotion whispered about in a canteen in a way that has no name but travels like one.
None of them mean to cause harm. That is the novel's quiet, uncomfortable argument: that the most damaging things people do to each other in workplaces are rarely the product of malice. They are the product of small needs - the need to be interesting, to be trusted, to be ahead, to be safe - dressed up as concern, as honesty, as just saying what everyone is already thinking.
Office of Lies follows one office on the third floor as the lies accumulate and the consequences arrive: an audit investigation, a near-fistfight, a disciplinary committee, a marriage that almost doesn't survive a pavement conversation, a woman dragged through the building by a story she never told about herself. And then, slowly, the harder thing - five people sitting in a room together and deciding whether they are willing to be honest, not just about others, but about themselves.
Rooted in the rhythms and textures of contemporary Lusaka - from Cairo Road to the Copperbelt, from Kachi Lodge to the shores of Lake Kariba - Office of Lies is a novel about the cost of the small betrayals, and about what it takes to stop paying it.
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Sharp. Warm. Achingly familiar.
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For Readers Who Enjoyed
Readers who love character-driven workplace fiction with a strong sense of place - stories where the real drama is not what people do but what they say about each other when no one is listening - will find themselves completely at home in the Finance and Administration department of Kamwalu General Supplies.
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- Office of Lies
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