How many hours of your one wild and precious life have you spent working in an office? The malaise at the heart of the white-collar bargain has driven many authors to resist, writing novels that pit the existential fear of annihilation against the creeping terror of the everyday.

Take Amélie Nothomb’s Fear and Trembling, where a young woman called … um … Amélie finds herself enmeshed in a nightmarish struggle with managers at the baffling Yumimoto Corporation. Her portrayal of Japan’s stiff hierarchies brought accusations of xenophobia, but it’s hard not to empathise with Amélie-san as she becomes entangled in a series of unfortunate misunderstandings that subject her to a catalogue of humiliations. As she looks through the enormous bay window on the top floor, she dreams of “throwing herself into the view”, transforming the mundane act of staring at the world beyond the confines of the office – as thousands of workers do every day – into an elemental struggle, a cataclysmic confrontation of epic proportions.

Another novel which reveals the void at the heart of contemporary working life is Jenny Turner’s Brainstorm. It opens with Lorna “still here” in front of her “large and ugly computer”, but with no idea of who she is or what she is doing there. This memory wipe both exposes the paper-thin premise that any job is really important and allows Turner to explore office politics in a London media environment, how the characters establish their places in the pecking order through unwritten rules and unspoken expectations. But what is Lorna’s role in the ship of work? Is she loyal underling or rebellious crew?

An encounter with a nameless, faceless, genderless interviewer – referred to only as The Person With Bad Breath – lands Josephine a data-entry job in Helen Phillips’s The Beautiful Bureaucrat. The airless corridors, the inescapable red tape, the colleagues with a tinge of cyborg all add up to a fresh hell which is delicately juxtaposed with moments of freedom, like the impromptu picnic of brie and figs she shares with her husband.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Colleagues with a hint of cyborg … Photograph: Blutgruppe/Corbis

The new secretary who puts Suzanne’s position in jeopardy in Lydie Salvayre’s Everyday Life is nameless as well. At the beginning of the novel she has only been in the office for two days, but already the strangely unreliable narrator is “talking about evil – a word that’s excessive, that’s just ridiculous here” and “arming [herself] for battle”. Minor annoyances are refracted into massive problems as Suzanne’s delusions balloon into a conviction she is being pushed out – a fate she decides she must stop at all costs.

At the heart of these very different novels is the idea that either something huge will happen or nothing will happen at all, and the question of which of these fates would be worse. The minutiae of the office novel – the cheese sandwiches, bathroom breaks and polyester shirts – enthral because something earth-shattering is going on just beneath the surface. We root for protagonists adrift in a sea of colleagues who cannot see beyond the status quo. The undercurrent of resistance to the regime gives the reader the sense that despite our powerlessness in the face of the forces which surround us and the banality of our humdrum existence, we are not alone.