5 books to help you wind down after your 9-to-5

After a workday full of tabs, pings, and “oh just a quick call,” your brain usually wants one of two things: something soft enough to sink into, or something sharp enough to cut through the fog. These 5 do both, in different ways, without asking you to optimise your rest.

I Hope This Finds You Well

Natalie Sue

William Morrow, 2024

First on the list is, of course, a quintessential workplace comedy. Natalie Sue’s debut, I Hope This Finds You Well, is quite tongue-in-cheek, a droll and here to pick you right back up, if, in case it does not find you well. Jolene is an exhausted admin at Supershops, Inc. who survives office life by writing vicious email postscripts and hiding them in white text. When one such email exposes her and sends her to the boss with his hands at odd places, she is overdue for sensitivity training and put under strict email rules. Then, miraculously or concerningly, an IT mistake gives her access to her coworkers’ private emails and DMs. Once she starts reading them (out of curiosity, obviously), she quickly learns that layoffs are coming. Jolene uses the intel she finds to try to save her job. But the deeper she gets into everyone’s secrets, the harder it is to keep her distance, especially with Cliff, the oddly kind HR guy.

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Kheerer Putul

Abanindranath Tagore

Ananda Publishers Pvt Ltd., 2000

If your brain feels overheated after work, which, let’s be honest, it does, then this fairy tale by Abanindranath Tagore is a great reset. It is short, effortless on the surface, and quietly absorbing. Kheerer Putul is a Bangla children’s fantasy that has a kheer doll sitting at the centre of the story. The plot moves through small tests of character, clever choices, and the kind of clear, storybook fairness that adult life rarely gives you. What makes it good for winding down is the pace. It does not demand intense focus or long emotional buildup, and it does not require you to track a hundred details. You can read a few pages at a time and still feel like you got somewhere. It also has that calming, old-story rhythm—repetition, simple turns, and a light sense of wonder without being heavy or preachy. If your day was all screens and speed, this one gently slows you back to a more human reading tempo.     

Charlie Besson is sitting in his idling car outside a Hollywood mansion, about to interview for the most chaotic assisting position imaginable. The client is Kathi Kannon, a famous actress and bestselling author with a larger-than-life reputation and zero interest in being low maintenance.

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A Star is Bored

Byron Lane

Henry Holt & Company, 2020

Trivia: The author of this book was actually a beloved assistant to the late Carrie Fisher, and this novel is loosely (totally) contingent on his time working for her.

Charlie Besson is sitting in his idling car outside a Hollywood mansion, about to interview for the most chaotic assisting position imaginable. The client is Kathi Kannon, a famous actress and bestselling author with a larger-than-life reputation and zero interest in being low maintenance. He eventually gets hired, and the book turns into a fast, bright ride through the personal-assistant universe—last-minute demands, dramatic errands, sudden travel, and the weird intimacy of being the person who holds someone else’s life together. There are late-night shopping sprees, impulsive trips, and the backstage view of fame that feels glamorous for five seconds and exhausting right after. As Charlie and Kathi grow closer, the job becomes more than work. Their bond starts to feel like friendship, and Charlie begins to question the role he has been playing in his own life. Caught between loyalty to the star who changed his world and the desire to step out of the sidelines, he has to decide whether he will keep living as support staff or finally claim a story of his own.

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Discontent

Beatriz Serrano, Maya Faye Lethem (Translator)

Vintage, 2025

Marisa looks like she is doing everything right, a great apartment in central Madrid, a steady situationship with her attractive neighbour, and a fast climb at a prestigious advertising agency. However, behind her polished office persona, she is miserable. She hides in her office, dissociates until the end of the workday, and drifts between dread, sarcasm, and self-destructive fantasies, all while holding up a career built on half-truths and stolen credit. When she is forced to attend the company’s annual team-building retreat in the Spanish mountains, the fragile system she has built to survive starts to collapse. Cut off from her usual escape routes and trapped with an unhinged boss, cheerfully compliant coworkers, and unsettling retreat staff, Marisa’s lies begin to catch up with her. As an old, buried incident from her workplace resurfaces, the retreat becomes a pressure cooker that pushes her toward a public unravelling. Discontent is a dark office comedy about corporate dread, performed competence, and what happens when the feelings you suppress all week finally break through.

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Mrito Albatross Chokh

Fatema Abedin

Batighar, 2020

Mrito Albatross Chokh is a collection of ten short stories written between 2011 and 2020, rooted firmly in the everyday lives we recognise. Set in a dense city of clustered apartments where private spaces collide, the book captures how modern life compresses people, relationships, and emotions into the same narrow walls, balconies, kitchens, and silences. Each story is, at its core, an account of human connection and its fractures. The characters sometimes lose themselves in the glitter of ordinary living, sometimes face the raw truth of scarcity, and sometimes find companionship in something as unexpected as a mobile app. Across the collection, the author paints intimate scenes of an extraordinary father-child bond, the complicated knots between husband and wife, the aching emptiness of a childless couple, grief for the dead, and the lingering tears for a lost lover.                         

Nur-E-Jannat Alif is a gender studies major and part-time writer who dreams of authoring a book someday. Find her at @literatureinsolitude on Instagram or send her your book/movie/television recommendations at nurejannatalif@gmail.com.