The Waiter: An Interactive Story - Paperback

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by Kwan Ann Tan (Author)

LIT HUB AND ELECTRIC LIT "MOST ANTICIPATED"

Enter the world of an unnamed worker navigating a society on the brink of collapse in this thrilling LitRPG-style fiction debut

"Tense, futuristic fun...A garden of forking paths, filled with urban legends and forbidden pleasures, that's easy to enter and hard to escape."
--Ed Park, author of Same Bed Different Dreams, Pulitzer Prize finalist for Fiction

In a future London, the rich hoard wealth and Waiters do the menial jobs no one else has time for. The city is being swallowed into the ground by "maws," gaping holes that appear and disappear without explanation--no one knows how or why they form, only that they seem to manifest wherever will cause the most chaos. Occasionally, a maw will leave behind a person: someone who wakes up without memories or any understanding of how they came to be swallowed up by the darkness... and you are one of them.

As an unnamed Waiter, you must select your jobs carefully or risk losing work credits, while also trying to keep your humanity intact. Meanwhile, a desire to understand yourself creeps in: Who were you before this? Who might you become?

This bold and imaginative book offers a world of possibilities, with eleven different endings and countless journeys toward them. A unique, voice-driven literary experience, this is an interactive fiction debut that prompts readers to wrestle with our agency and our desires in a world that feels like it's coming apart at the seams.

Author Biography

Kwan Ann Tan is originally from Malaysia but is currently based in London. Her work has previously been published in The Offing, Joyland Magazine, and Sine Theta Magazine. She won the 2023 Bournemouth Writing Prize and is an alumnus of the Tin House Winter Workshop.

Number of Pages: 144

Dimensions: 0.5 x 7.9 x 5.8 IN

Publication Date: November 03, 2026