Excerpt from The Room by Jonas Karlsson, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

So I checked everywhere, all the places where in the majority of offices you might expect to come across photocopy paper, but there was none to be found. Finally I made my way round the corner, past the toilets, where I had a feeling I had previously seen a small room.


At first I couldn't find the light switch. I felt along the walls on either side of the door, and in the end I gave up, walked out again, and found the switch on the outside. What an odd place to put it, I thought, and went back in.

It took a moment for the fluorescent light to flicker into life, but I was quickly able to ascertain that there was no photocopy paper there. Even so, I got an immediate sense that there was something special about this place.


It was a fairly small room. A desk in the middle. A computer, files on a shelf. Pens and other office equipment. Nothing remarkable. But all of it in perfect order.

Neat and tidy.

Against one wall stood a large, shiny filing cabinet with a desk fan on top of it. A dark-green carpet covered the floor. Clean. Free from dust. Everything neatly lined up. It looked slightly studied. Prepared. As if the room were waiting for someone.


I went out, closed the door, and switched off the light. Out of curiosity I opened the door again. I got a feeling I had to check. How could I be sure the light wasn't still on in there? Suddenly I felt uncertain whether up or down meant on or off. The whole idea of having the switch on the outside felt strange. A bit like the light inside a fridge. I peered in at the room. It was dark.

5.

The next day my new boss came over to our desk in the big, open-plan office, with his thinning hair and cotton cardigan. His name was Karl, and the cotton cardigan wasn't very new, but looked expensive. He stopped next to Håkan and pointed out, without any introductory pleasantries, that my shoes were dirty.

"We try to think about the floor," he said, pointing at a metal basket full of blue plastic shoe covers hanging on the wall right next to the entrance.

"Of course," I said. "Naturally."

He patted me on the shoulder and walked away.

I thought it was strange that he didn't smile. Don't people usually try to smooth over that sort of remark with a little smile? To show that you're still friends, and make me, as the newcomer, feel welcome? It wasn't nice, getting told off as bluntly as that. It had a serious impact on my work and I sat there for a long while with an uncomfortable feeling that I'd just been taught a lesson. It was annoying that I hadn't thought about the shoe covers myself. Obviously I would have done it if I'd had time to think about it.

He had managed to make me feel both stupid and insecure, when in actual fact I was one of the smartest. Besides, it was just rude to walk off like that. I counted the number of errors my boss had made during my short time there and came up with three. Plus one minor infraction. Three or four, then, depending on how you looked at it.

Håkan, who had obviously heard the whole thing, sat there unusually quietly, apparently preoccupied with some document. Carry on pretending, I thought. Carry on pretending.

I leaned down and undid my shoes even though I was in the middle of one of my fifty-five- minute work periods, and something like that really ought to be dealt with during one of the short breaks.

I looked around the room. Everyone was immersed in their own business. Yet it still felt as though they were all watching me as I walked, in just my socks, over to the small kitchen at the other end of the office and fetched a cloth. I cleaned up as best I could, fetched a pair of shoe covers, and put them over my shoes. They rustled as I took the cloth back. I tried to see if anyone else was wearing shoe covers, but they were all wearing either slippers or normal shoes. Maybe they were indoor shoes, I thought.

Excerpted from The Room by Jonas Karlsson. Copyright © 2015 by Jonas Karlsson. Excerpted by permission of Hogarth Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.