Topping & Company Working Group

Join us for the final meeting of the 'Topping & Co Working Group' which explores the rapidly changing character of work in the modern world.

Over the past year we have read novels, works of philosophy, and memoirs that have explored the changing nature of work, the hopes and frustrations that we pour into our jobs, and how people chart their way through life. Here is a list of books we have covered to date, and below you will find the final book in this series, Driver.

• Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata
• The Craftsman by Richard Sennett
• On the Clock by Claire Baglin
• Kick the Latch by Kathryn Scanlan
• Engrained by Callum Robinson
• The Life of the Mind by Christine Smallwood
• What You are Looking For is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama
• The Expansion Project by Ben Pester

The book group is hosted by our bookseller Michael, a former philosophy professor who has had more jobs than he’d like to admit.

For our final book, we are reading Driver by Mattia Filice.

Driver is a book about a young man from the provinces who moves to Paris and studies to become a train driver. As he learns about trains and their intricate workings, he is transported into a world in constant motion, with its own laws and codes and specialized language, its own heroes and legends and manifold dangers. Written in a style as surprising and eclectic as a night on the rails—packed with inside jokes and allusions that extend from Arthur Rimbaud to hip-hop and beyond—Driver takes us deep into the world of the train, until it becomes, like the ship in Moby-Dick, a microcosm of the world at large.

Drawing on twenty years of experience driving trains, Mattia Filice writes memorably about solitude and sleepless nights in the cab, accidents and breakdowns, but also about the lives and personalities of his fellow workers and the conversations and solidarity they share, both on the job and on the picket line, in what is a continual struggle to improve the conditions of work.

Unsentimental yet full of feeling, Driver is both an unusual and formally adventurous novel about labor and life and a stirring ode to the power of the collective.

Reading Group Structure

Ticketing: Each place is £5, which can be redeemed against a copy of a reading group book.

Frequency: Each reading group will meet once a month, on a set day of the week. You do not need to commit to one group, or every meeting! Just book for those you're interested in each month, and we hope to entice you back for another one.