But certain gendered instincts – people pleasing, playing peacemaker, considering another person’s comfort a precondition for my own – served me well. I don’t know how the daughter (I keep saying daughter as she was unnamed in the book) kept her patience and was mostly able to stay polite and courteous as I think I would have cut ties very early on. The nuances of our lead character’s co-dependent, majoritively toxic, mother-daughter relationship are also looked at in depth and reveal how much this affects all areas of both of their lives. This month, when my book was published in the US, he sent me a congratulatory message, saying how thrilled he was for my success. Not Safe for Work explores how women are victimised, judged and silenced and forever having to balance not speaking up when, for example, they’re abused or harassed, if the person who did it to them is more powerful.

When someone senior tells you how pretty you look, you smile and thank him – and make a mental note never to wear that dress alone with him again. I told myself that someday, when I had enough power that people cared what I had to say, I would make a stand for what was right. I wanted to know what the characters were feeling and what their next move was going to be and I think that was done really well. I left my job at the TV network to go to graduate school, during which time I wrote a novel about a Hollywood assistant and the slippery slope of complicity. Please get in touch and we will do our best to source your book, no matter how unusual or specialist.Throwing items in the office, and particularly in the direction of your employees, is now off limits. From my perch outside my boss’s office, I saw how little my personal opinion mattered, how interchangeable and dispensable I was. I was a teeny tiny bit disappointed with the open ending but hopefully it means that there may be more to come as I would love to read more about these characters and their lives. In fact, it pulled me right in through its mix of exploring serious topics such as sexual harassment and abuse, but told from the POV of a woman who is smart, sassy and not afraid of seeing the irony in a situation.

Isabel Kaplan’s forthcoming debut novel, Not Safe For Work, follows an ambitious young woman trying to succeed in the entertainment industry without selling her soul. This read like The Devil Wears Prada set in Hollywood, as she starts off thinking that this is a job to tide her over, get her mother to stop bugging her and then she’ll get a real job. Quickly becoming embroiled in the day to day discussions, power struggles and gossip in her office, she meets a pretty astonishing array of dreadful people, classic LA/Hollywood characters. You know, the kind of uncle who spends a little too much time with the young women and gives goodbye kisses that land too close to the mouth. I loved that the ambiguous ending flipped things onto you and made you think about what you would do if you were ever faced with an unfair, difficult situation.

While I don’t want to talk too much about the detailed plot, I do want to describe the overall feel of the book. Rumours start to circulate around the office that there are sexual predators working amongst them and the realisation sets in that there is a lot to lose by speaking out and plenty to gain by staying quiet. Only after the fact did it occur to me to wonder why a male executive would ever think it appropriate to give a female employee a goodbye kiss at the end of the work day, regardless of where on the face his lips landed. behind the glitter and the justice, everyone is tarnished and compromised - including even our narrator. I was complimented for having “good energy”, and my “niches” were identified as “women” and “books”.

Opening sentence: The thing about Los Angeles is that it’s awful and I hate it, but when I’m there, nowhere else exists, and I can’t imagine leaving. The writing is fresh and stylish and the conversational tone helps the thought-provoking narrative zip along. She was needy, unreasonable and insistent on maintaining a strong dependency between herself and her daughter.So when you land a job in television, you're ready for anything: pulling all-nighters, leaning on your powerful mother's contacts, keeping your boss happy whatever - and whoever - the cost. Sometimes it’s easy to preach about what you would do in a theoretical situation, until you are facing it head on. I felt personally that I’m just a little bit out of the age range for this as some of the situations in the book were fairly obviously on the way and she just didn’t seem to pick up on the cues. We urgently need to develop avenues for conversations about all the behaviour that lives in this grey space.