THE British fiction scene just doesn’t support enough novels about working in shops. This thought popped into my head while reading two recent novels, which both build on retail experience.

Both are, rightly, I think, highly recommended. Neither are British. The absent shopworker is another sign of how the current British fiction scene doesn’t really reflect the Britain we live in. Some 2.7 million Brits — nearly a tenth of the workforce — work in retail. But like a lot of other working people, their lives are not well reflected in British novels.

The first book is Caroline O’Donoghue’s The Rachel Incident, which appeared in paperback this year. It’s a funny, bittersweet comedy about being a young adult, about those first steps when you make your best friends and worst choices.

The novel follows Rachel as she graduates from Cork University straight into a recession, stumbling into her new best friend and a new fairly crap shop job. I found the tale of going from student hopes to the realities of post-2008 crash employment nostalgic, having myself graduated in the Thatcher years.

The book isn’t a piece of gritty social-realist commentary; it’s a romantic comedy. Its real romance is about making a best friend, not a boyfriend. The Rachel Incident (no spoilers) itself is darkly funny.

There is a lot of the finding-your-feet comic drama in the novel’s tales of having a best friend, an imperfect boyfriend and those older-couple friends you make because you think they are mature and sophisticated and sorted (but are capable of being terrible screw-ups like the rest of us).

But like a lot of Irish fiction, O’Donoghue’s novel takes some of the harder social realities as read — the post-crash jobs problem, the battle over abortion.

Rachel scrapes by working in a big-chain bookshop, and among all the other reflections of what it means to be young, the novel has a great sense of how you try to get by in a boring job by alternately being good or wilfully bad at the work, how it feels when you are chasing extra shifts, they don’t want to give you, and how annoying it is when you get them anyway.

In Britain, the leading authors tend to self-consciously announce they are doing a “state of the nation” book before they get this real. And even then, there are probably as many self-consciously “state of the nation” books about Brexit as austerity or housing or the lower end of the job market.

By contrast, in Irish fiction, this kind of real-world can be just part of the texture of a book about something else — so, for example, Paul Murray wrote what was in my mind one of the best books about the Irish financial crash, 2015’s The Mark and the Void.

His latest book, 2023’s The Bee Sting, is not about the crash at all: it is really a big rambling family drama. It’s garrulously gripping, sometimes funny, somewhat flawed in my view, but still worth reading, and rightly a bestseller.

However, while it is not about Ireland’s economic hard times, they simply, naturally, form part of the fabric of the novel. Again, this is much rarer in Britain’s fiction scene.

I think this reflects a degree of middle-class isolation in British fiction; authors are a voice of the nation, and in Ireland, the crash was felt as a national event, something that hit everyone.

In Britain, a fair slice of better-heeled, older, owner-occupier folk insulated themselves from austerity, and its effects were pushed onto a different section of a fragmented society.

Adelle Waldman’s Help Wanted, published this year, is the second big “retail” novel. Waldmann has very much set out to write a “state of the nation” novel about what it means to scrape by in retail.

Her characters work the night shift that unloads the stock in a US “big box” store like a Walmart or Target. It’s very good on how people scrape by chasing shifts, being excluded from health insurance, relying on car shares and food stamps and living in their parent’s basements.

It’s also very good on how we make the work-day go by in an unsatisfying job, dealing with boredom by creating your own patterns and rituals.

It’s more of a “raisins of disappointment” than a full-on Grapes of Wrath, but it’s a good description, in fiction, about how the “American dream” went sour, leaving folk scrabbling to get by. I would thoroughly recommend a read.

Waldman can get under her characters’ skin and worked long enough in retail to understand the world, although I sometimes felt she was maybe trying a little too hard. Fellow author Elif Batuman called the book “a great 19th century novel about now.”

The novel is good for this reason, but perhaps sometimes I felt Waldman was occasionally slightly patronising her characters, which would also be a Dickensian touch.

This is, however, only a slight reservation about a novel I recommend you read. If you do like it, I would doubly recommend searching out Stewart O’Nan’s 2007 book Last Night at the Lobster, a tale of a closing-down branch of a chain restaurant, which is also a great US fiction about regular folk.

There have been other significant “shopworker” stories from other countries. Sayaka Murata’s 2016 Convenience Store Woman was an international hit: it is a strange, beguiling meditation on an unconventional rebellion against conservative Japanese roles for women, but also a story on the important social value — but low financial reward — of retail employment.

In Irish fiction, down-to-earth folk, like shopworkers, appear naturally on the page. In US fiction, authors feel the need to make an effort to go “state of the nation” including looking into retail. A breakthrough Japanese novel is about life behind the counter in the corner shop.

Both The Rachel Incident and Help Wanted are recent top-rated, bestseller books, not an obscure corner of Irish or US fiction. By contrast, contemporary British fiction seems to sit in more of a bubble and not take such interest in ordinary life, including on the shop floor.

Follow Solomon on X @SolHughesWriter.