Hot Desk – Zara Stoneley

Same desk, different days. A post-it note is just the beginning… Alice loves her job and wants to keep it – whatever the price. But then she’s told the company is switching to flexible working and hot desking…Alice’s desk might look a mess, but she knows exactly where everything is. Or she did. Until she found out she’s going to share it with the most annoying guy in the office. Jamie can work from anywhere. He’s quite happy to sweep his work life into a box at the end of the working day. But can sharing a desk with Alice be as much fun as teasing her in person? With no option but to try it and see, will their relationship turn into open warfare or will it ever progress beyond a post-it note?

This book contains:

Depicts life after COVID-19 lockdown
Minor unwanted advances appropriately handled and stopped
Minor child custody dispute.

Alice is excited to return to work after the second COVID-19 lockdown. She’s desperate to return to some form of normalcy and gain some of her own space back. She’s the second youngest of four sisters who lived under each other’s feet until she finally moved out after uni. At which point she moved into a share house with 4 roommates, got a boyfriend who didn’t mind rearranging and disposing of her possessions and her younger sister kept helping herself to her clothes.

Jamie is a bit of a mystery to us. He sits opposite Alice every day at work, seems to irritate her no end and has questionable tastes in women.

After the second COVID-19 lockdown, We Got Designs has returned to the office. Unfortunately, they’ve lost several clients and things are tight financially now. They make a deal with another company to share their office space and have their staff job share their desks with a hot desk policy.

They’re pairing up staff to share a desk on alternate days to help reduce costs without laying off staff. For Alice, she’s been assigned to share a desk with Jamie and lose yet another bit of personal space.

My first thought is that this is THE FIRST BOOK since the COVID pandemic started that actually talked about it. While I know it hasn’t been easy for people (my city has been in lockdown for more than 260 days between April 2020 and November 2021, when I wrote this review, yes I know, major delay in writing this and releasing it, sorry!), I can’t believe that by November 2021 this is the first time any book I’ve read has mentioned the pandemic. I mean, it’s a GLOBAL pandemic that has affected million and millions of people in all sorts of unimaginable ways.

How has no book before this even mentioned masks, social distancing, forced working from home, mass deaths or just generally the way our lives have changed?

I love that the whole premise of this romance was how COVID impacted us, changed us and what we’ve learnt about ourselves and our loved ones. While I know there are lots of ways to address this, I loved how this based those learnings on something that almost all of us can relate to.

Being forced to stay at home for a period of time due to a pandemic. Isolated from everyone except those we share a home with. Not to mention the fear and panic I’m sure many of us felt during this time. It was so refreshing and I’m so grateful we’ll have at least one book out there that depicts the realities we’ve all faced over the past two years.