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From a dazzling new international voice, an audacious, darkly funny novel about a young woman whose carefully crafted office persona threatens to crack when she's forced to attend her company's annual retreat.
On the surface, Marisa's life looks enviable. She lives in a beautiful apartment in the center of Madrid, she has a hot neighbor who is always around to sleep with her, and she's quickly risen through the ranks at a successful advertising agency. And yet she's drowning in a dark hole of existential dread induced by the banality of corporate life. Marisa hates her job and everyone at it. She spends her working hours locked in her office hiding from her coworkers, bingeing YouTube videos, and getting high on tranquilizers. When she has the time, she escapes to her favorite museum where she contemplates the meaning of life while staring at Hieronymus Bosch paintings, or trying to get hit by a car so she can go on disability.
But Marisa's dubious success, which is largely built on lies and work she's stolen from other people, is in danger of being exposed when she's forced to go on her company's team-building retreat. Isolated in the Segovia forests, haunted by the deeply buried memory of a former coworker, and surrounded by psychopathic bosses, overzealous coworkers, flirty retreat staff, and an excess of drugs, Marisa finds herself acting on her wildest impulses and is pushed to the brink of a complete spiral.
Did you read any translated books last year? If so, what was its title, and in what language was it originally written?
Discontent: A Novel by Beatriz Serrano. Spanish. About a young woman in Madrid who hates her job at an advertising company. Wickedly funny. My Friends by Fredrik Backman: Swedish We'll Prescribe You. Cat by Syou Ishida: Japanese. Quirky, charming book about a mysterious clinic that recommends cat...
-Vivian_H
What are you reading this week? And what did you think of last week’s books? (10/23/2025)
I just finished Disconnected by Beatriz Serrano and am currently reading Never OverbyClate Gilmore. Discontent is remarkably quirky. Great translation by Mara Faye Lethe.
-Vivian_H
"A wry work of spectacular wit, Discontent skewers every novel of workplace ennui that has come before it. Beatriz Serrano writes with a caustic flare for detail, exploring the small humiliations of the everyday corporate office with charm and utter hilarity. Absolutely brilliant." —Danya Kukafka, author of Notes on an Execution
"This intelligent, engaging novel perfectly captures the discontent of our contemporary minds, managing all the while to be totally hilarious." —Ayşegül Savaş, author of The Anthropologists
This information about Discontent was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Beatriz Serrano is a writer and a journalist who has written for publications such as BuzzFeed, Vanity Fair, GQ, Harper's Bazaar, El País, SModa and Vogue. Along with writer Guillermo Alonso, she currently co-directs the podcast "Arsenic Caviar", which won the Ondas Prize for best conversational podcast. Discontent is her first novel. She lives in Madrid.
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