COOP
A Novelette
On work and words, and how they contort the world.
18 December 2025
Paperback / 9781914221385
ebook / 9781914221392
150 pages
Lena is a part-time bookseller in a bougie design studio in Oxford Circus. In between minimum-wage work under a politically hostile boss and strained communications with her parents, her days are shaped by a fraught relationship with food, ambiguous experiments in creative writing, and mounting pressure to find a ‘proper’ postgraduate job.
In taut, pocket-sized vignettes, COOP reveals a suffocating lattice of language that makes up a precarious London life. But as each word of her story unravels, Lena discovers interstices between them—to find autonomy and escape.
‘A treasure of a book. Nida Sajid exercises an inventiveness and lightness of touch that transform the daily humiliations of retail work and zero-hour contracts, calorie counting and pompous dates into (to quote Lena quoting Marx) a “coup d’état in miniature” upon the page … this novelette is as bright as it is cutting.’
— Hannah Regel, author of The Last Sane Woman
‘COOP is unlike anything else I’ve read recently. Addictive and cathartic to read with an immediacy that propels you through the novelette, Nida’s incisive prose captures Lena’s fleeting thoughts and feelings as she tries to survive … clinging to work, messages, poetry, writing and the news in an effort to resist disappearance. This book left me aching and feeling more human.’
— Mohamed Tonsy, bookseller, ceramicist and author of You Must Believe in Spring
‘Form and content play off one another in this experimental series of vignettes, which come together to offer a commentary—sardonic yet earnest, poignant yet breezy—on the disjointed anxiety and pervasive sense of loss that mark the times we live in today.’
— Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi, author of The Centre
‘Tender and wry—Sajid dissects the nice violences of liberal culture, skewering the affectations of the complacent classes, in this bookshop novel for genocidal times.’
— Louise O'Hare, author of Centrefold 1974: A Memoir