The Other Ones

What would you do if a group of your fellow office workers won the lottery? The Other Ones tracks the actions and reactions of multiple characters in the wake of this cataclysmic event, tracing the effect it has on them, for good and bad, over the following year. Some dig in, some quit, some go more than a little crazy. One commits suicide by jumping off the roof of the office, then returns as a ghost to haunt the winners. Funny, tragic, and real, The Other Ones shines a light on our contemporary relationships to money, work, and one another.

Praise for The Other Ones

“Using his trademark wry, observant humor, Dave Housley explores a fascinating premise—when an office lottery pool hits the jackpot, what happens to the workers who are now multi-millionaires versus those who didn’t put in a dollar to play? Filled with insights and skewering commentary on office politics and relationships, marketing culture, ageism, and commercialism, THE OTHER ONES delivers a funny and suspenseful tale of a corporate crisis as you’ve never read before.”

— Angie Kim, author of Miracle Creek 

“The Office’ meets Then We Came to the End meets that recurring nightmare where your most loathsome co-workers win the lottery that you mocked them for playing each week. Dave Housley’s sardonic, sly, gem of a novel, The Other Ones, pinpoints the beating heart in the cubicle. Yes, even the steadiest hum of corporate machinery can be knocked off-kilter, humanizing those Dockers-wearing, M-F, 9-5 strangers you’re avoiding in the elevator, and “if only” haunts us all.”

— Leslie Pietrzyk, author of Admit This to No One 

“Dave Housley’s The Other Ones is a riotous and bighearted office comedy, about a surprising kind of Rapture where it’s not a heavenly force that whisks away half of your co-workers but a winning lottery ticket you forget to throw in on. Fans of Chris Bachelder or Sam Lipsyte will thrill as Housley applies eight point eight million dollars worth of regret to his loveable left-behind heroes, eager to learn who will crack among the cubicles and who might find another way to win their own good life.”

— Matt Bell, author of Appleseed