1000 Coffees 1 - 1000 Coffees

At London Kingsmere, the trains are only part of the job. For Station Manager Dan Mercer, every working day begins with the same essential requirement: regular coffee, skinny milk, three brown sugars. After that come the passengers, staff shortages, late trains, contractors, broken equipment, payroll mistakes, lost property, difficult conversations, senior managers wanting answers-and thousands of people who simply need to get where they are going. Dan is good at his job. Perhaps too good at believing he has to be everywhere at once. Blunt, quick-witted and fiercely protective of his staff, he knows Kingsmere by its sounds, its rhythms and the tiny changes that tell him something is about to go wrong. He can manage a crowded platform, challenge a contractor and answer a passenger's question before his first coffee has gone cold. Managing people, however, is rarely as straightforward. When valuable items begin disappearing from Lost Property, suspicion falls on an experienced and popular member of Dan's team. What begins as an uncomfortable workplace investigation becomes a test of evidence, loyalty and Dan's own certainty about the people around him. Meanwhile, Kingsmere keeps moving. There are football crowds to manage, agency staff to check, retailers to reassure, employees with families and problems of their own, and a wife at home who understands better than anyone how difficult Dan finds it to leave the railway at the railway. Then one hot Saturday night, a moment on a crowded platform turns an ordinary shift into something far more serious. 1000 Coffees: A Manager's Life is a warm, funny and sharply observed contemporary novel about the unseen world behind a busy railway station-and the people responsible for keeping it moving when almost nobody notices that…