From ride-hailing to door-to-door delivery apps, labor platforms have created a shining new way for millions across the globe to make a living, offering flexibility, autonomy, and low-entry barriers. These forms of gig work have experienced rapid growth while raising questions around worker protections, job security, loneliness, and the role of technology.
Gig work can be understood as a significant shift away from a standard form of employment, while also being lonelier, riskier, and oftentimes more dangerous—but while the platform economy has only recently taken off, gig work itself isn’t new. The novels below grapple with various forms of gig work across time, spanning from a novel as old as 1890 to 2025’s Booker winning Flesh. These novels give a prismatic view into the everyday lives of gig workers. The authors on this list raise existential, psychological questions, while often staying cool and detached.
Writing about the economics of work is an entangled affair. These books show us the varied relationships people have with money, who gets to make it, and at what cost to themselves.
Margo’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe (2024)
When Margo discovers she’s pregnant with her English professor’s child, she finds herself needing to drop out of college to bring up the child by herself. Her professor refuses to acknowledge the baby, leaving her with only a small adjustment amount and an NDA. This is when she decides to open an OnlyFans account—it makes sense domestically, logistically, and financially. She works her own hours while making a healthy sum that helps her finance her and her child’s life. Told in a funny, light tone, Margo’s life and pathos come out beautifully in Thorpe’s pen. She is interested in how money works and how the moneyed class behaves with their access to it. Margo is often left in precarious situations, but Thorpe asks more of her character, making her strong and inviolable.
Hunger by Knut Hamsun (1890, translated by George Egerton)
A story from another century about a freelance writer between projects, Hunger brought literary fame to Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun who would go on to win the Nobel in 1920. Written in a stream of consciousness style, Hunger is a wild, manic read that takes us deep into the psychology of the protagonist. He is without money, living from assignment to assignment, and yet lends money to those in need, going hungry himself. He is creative and talented but oftentimes his ideas don’t materialize, leaving him with existential angst. He walks through the city of Oslo in harsh winters, with nothing but a few scraps of clothes on him, a pencil his closest companion. When an editor greenlights an idea or he gets paid for an article, the protagonist is overpowered by delusions of grandeur. On other occasions, hungry, in need of money or shelter, he physically chases after strangers he encounters on the street. Through all of this, he remains in conversation with god, believing that he has been chosen to go through these turmoils.
Temporary by Hilary Leichter (2020)
“There is nothing more personal than doing your job.” This mantra guides the unnamed protagonist of Temporary, who is currently between 23 temp gigs while chasing the ultimate dream of a steady, permanent job. She trusts the temp agency to “knead my résumé into a series of paychecks that constitute a life.” She delivers mail, shines shoes at Grand Central, does high-level window cleaning, stands in place of mannequins in stores, and fills in for the Chairman of the Board of a corporation. In the hands of a lesser writer, these exaggerated, absurdist scenarios might fall flat. But Leichter’s deadpan delivery seethes and stings. Temporary questions the way we work now and how a certain sense of depravity in work has been normalized. Is it even possible to stop working?
Luster by Raven Leilani (2020)
The protagonist is Edie, a Black woman in her 20s holding an admin job in a publishing firm. She is poorly paid, watches porn at work, and sleeps with coworkers. She shares her roach infested Bushwick apartment and gets into a relationship with an older, white, married man, Eric, who is in an open relationship. Frustrated with her living condition, Edie writes to her 23-year-old landlord who sells tea on Instagram: “We are all trying to eat.” When Edie loses her job, she starts working for a food delivery startup and finally, unable to afford city rent, moves in with Eric and his family in their suburban house. The novel tells the story about the grind young women have to go through to survive a low-paying job in a city like New York through the lens of race, class, and art, making it a poignant pick that remains fresh.
Your Driver Is Waiting by Priya Guns (2023)
Ride-share driver Damani is Tamil, queer, and straining to make ends meet in an unnamed North American city. She drives by protests of all kinds throughout the day (and night), unable to attend them, feeling smaller all the same. She endures low wages, lack of inspiration, and endless tiredness in Priya Guns’ debut novel, inspired by Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. Rent is always due and electricity bill hardly ever paid on time as Damani drives through these travails aiming to secure more tips, more five-star ratings, more cash. The grind is relentless. For Damani, driving this ride-share, inviting people into a hyper-personal space, and having to deal with passengers is a way of getting a full serving of life experience. That’s when she meets Joelene, an encounter that changes things for good. Your Driver Is Waiting tackles racism, classism, work, and life beyond it—all while satirizing the everyday trials and tribulations that come with her daily work.
Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata (2016, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori)
Convenience Store Woman was celebrated Japanese writer Sayaka Murata’s first novel to be translated to English. A strange 36-year-old woman, Keiko Furukura, works a rather strange job as a convenience store worker in Japan. She is alienated from the world, friendless and uninterested in dating or having sex. Murata herself worked at a convenience store for nearly eighteen years and brings a matter-of-fact, blithe straightforwardness to her fiction. Refreshing in its insight into work, femininity, and the everyday rigmarole, and told in an elegant, terse, deadpan delivery, the novel perfectly captures the brokenness of convenience store jobs and the way they make or break their workers’ psyche. Keiko eats at the store, wears a uniform, talks in clipped responses, and conducts herself according to the guidelines laid out in the store’s manual. “This is the only way I can be a normal person,” she thinks. This should tell us enough about the place of work in her life and how it shapes her.
Flesh by David Szalay (2025)
Istavan, Flesh’s shy, reticent protagonist, moves through life in search of nothing much. He’s introverted but never not working, often in conversations with others, but never speaks much himself. Instead of looking for his next assignment, work finds him and delivers him to the next stage in life. Through a series of jobs starting from a drug delivery agent to a war soldier to a pub bouncer to a driver to a business owner and back to being a pub bouncer again, Istavan’s life is shown through vignettes of various jobs he holds in different stages of life and how it impacts him. No matter what the life situation, he is forever that lonesome outsider trying to make ends meet. Szalay’s portrait of Istavan’s rags-to-riches life is singular in the way it is told. Szalay often skips the more intense parts of Istavan’s experiences, leaving them to the reader’s imagination. The resultant book is racy, remote, and roiling, capturing the way work dominates the lives of those of us who have nothing to lose because we come from nothing.
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