Office Girl by Joe Meno

Joe Meno's sixth novel might act as an effective acid test for determining hipster tolerance: one protagonist spends his time recording the sounds made by snow, balloons and sadness, the other dreams of starting a guerilla art movement based around the complete terribleness of everything popular, and both spend the majority of the story riding bikes. Their tastes are obscure, their clothes are thrift store-chic: they are the perfect proto-hipsters of 1999.

Odile is a failed art student and Manic Hipster Dream Girl through and through, Jack is a twenty-six year old divorcee with an ever-mounting collection of step-parents and unfinished art projects; together, they struggle to fend off the ennui of inner city life, raging back against mindless pop culture and the mundanity of the everyday with a series of bizarre artistic stunts involving silver balloons, ghost costumes and a misunderstood former classmate by the name of Alphonso F.

Permeated throughout with an irreverent charm, Meno's novel effectively evokes the frustration of artistic ambition within a culture uninterested in anything outwith the mainstream and, more universally, the aimlessness of being young with no idea of what you want to do, just an abundance of things you don't. [Ross McIndoe]