The Secret Lives of Public Servants

by Anne Lévesque

Lee Gaik Wah, Stephen Higdon, and Caroline Melançon are long-missing public servants known, at the Fund, as Lost Annuitants. Art school graduate Del Charbonneau is the pension clerk obsessed with tracking them down. Wry, warm, and wonderfully strange, The Secret Lives of Public Servants interweaves the past and present of four unforgettable characters amidst the humorous depiction and behind-the- scenes goings-on of a large government office.

A meditation on working for a living, the power of the creative imagination, and the bonds that sustain us.

244 pages, Paperback

Published June 20, 2025

Reviews

[Paul Dembina · Rating 5 out of 5]

A tale of office life and some of the bureaucracy involved. Del is a low level clerk working in a Canadian government department repsonsible for civil service pensions. She's been given 3 files to follow up lost annuitants (aka. ex-exmployees who haven't been contactable).

The novel follows Del's life in the office plus the lives of the these 3 "lost" people.

Although is has quite a few Canadian references I didn't quite get this is an amusing and affecting tale.

By the way, if you like this book you should also consider checking out Jeff Bursey's book Verbatim: A Novel

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

A creative method part short stories part novel part satirical snippets of working life, specifically for the federal government but too resonant with my own nonprofit experience at times. So there’s your theme. I believe it was John Metcalf who lamented in an introduction to a collection of the year’s best Canadian short stories (chosen by John) the lack of fiction set in and dealing with the workplace, where most of us spend much of our time. Well here’s one!

But also, it seemed to me to be about aging. The young government workers were tracking down former workers, who were living lives chosen in the decisions of their youth and middle age, living with their regrets and their pride. There is a certain sadness in the futility of the work satirized when seen in the rear view. Perhaps a good reminder not to put too much into the work as there is so much more to living well.

[Marc Nash · Rating 4 out of 5]

Video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZ8Ux...

Office life and culture within the Canadian Civil Service

[John A · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t want to spoil this book, and this is clearly not a professional review, but I had to rant a little bit about it, and say how much I enjoyed the story and the writing.
The story is approachable, tragic and hilarious. The characters are unforgettable.
I’ve enjoyed many of the Galleon books so far, but this might be my favourite, which says a lot.
Perhaps it just hit me at the right time.
Anyway - this book deserves an audience.
Funny enough, it reminded me, to some extent, of Michael Chabon at his best, and a little bit of The Office. Both comparisons can be considered high praise from me.

[Ian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Anne Lévesque’s second novel, The Secret Lives of Public Servants, uncovers, in playful fashion, the eccentricities, fears and aspirations of several current and former employees of Canada’s public service. Chief among these is Del Charbonneau, career public servant working for the Government of Canada Pension Centre. Del’s position entails frequent public contact, helping people navigate the bureaucratic intricacies of Canada’s pension plan. Another of her duties is to track down former employees who have neglected to take steps to collect the pension payments to which they are entitled. Del’s search for three “lost annuitants” drives the novel’s main narrative thread. Years earlier and for various reasons Caroline Melançon, Lee Gaik Wah and Stephen Higdon left their government jobs, but at age sixty they are eligible to begin collecting a pension based on their number of years of public service. Sounds like straightforward detective work. But Anne Lévesque has written anything but a straightforward novel. For one thing, Del is an artist whose abiding goal is to create an “installation” that evokes office life and to that end is constantly searching for and collecting workplace paraphernalia to use in her project. Del is also an adept observer, watching her colleagues’ comings and goings, sensing their moods, taking note of new hirings and departures through retirement or promotion. Most notably, her narrative is coloured by the frustration and cynicism that often permeates office environments as likes and dislikes, petty rivalries, interpersonal conflicts, biases and a diversity of quirky human character traits influence how people interact and how things do or don’t get done. Lévesque also centres a good portion of her narrative around the activities of the three lost annuitants, the objects of Del’s search, imagining in sometimes amusing, sometimes poignant detail their days beyond the public service as they deal with life challenges and struggle to find meaning and fulfillment. The novel’s structure keeps the reader off balance. Rather than arrange her material in a linear manner, Lévesque opts for a kaleidoscopic approach, interweaving the stories of her four chief characters in a way that might come across as scattershot, but which effectively evokes life’s randomness within the universal human search for a path forward. As cultural touchstones, the author invokes the Coen Brothers movie The Big Lebowsky and the cable TV series The Americans, both of which suggest that apparently conventional lives can contain secret depths that people strive every day to keep hidden. Often wryly humorous, The Secret Lives of Public Servants impresses as a thoughtful rumination on the bureaucratic morass of office life, one that, as a bonus, gleefully chafes against the boundaries of conventional narrative structures to provide a highly original and enjoyable reading experience.

[Jason Bergsy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Secret Lives of Public Servants follows a few public/government workers, current and former, and creates an intriguing storyline through their careers and lives. At first feeling like a sprawling sort of anthology, things start to tie together as you get through the novel.

This book was a good time. It's an emotional rollercoaster, but has very funny comic relief and it feels very relatable throughout. It sort of feels like home or a family in a sense. It's something that you really like, even love, but you might not always be super keen on it. It'll knock you down, but it'll pick you back up and tell you it's alright.

It's a very modern novel and it doesn't hide that, but it doesn't take me out of the narrative like a lot of other modern novels do. References to the internet and social media, along with more modern reference like The Big Lebowski (which is featured a lot throughout) don't really feel out of place, and ties in with the book's personality. (Thankfully TBL, as it's referenced in the novel, is one of my favorite movies, makes me want to rewatch it)

Overall I really liked the book, and I think a big part that helped that was reading it along with a group of other readers on Instagram, along with insight from the publisher and the author. I think I would have loved this work regardless, but having others to help me open myself up to another view and perspective was a very interesting experience.

[Andrew Sare · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little too close to home for this public servant (me) perhaps. There were many instance where Lévesque's novel made me itch in my skin by pointing out the little banalities of office life and its culture, the fog of the repetition, all while real life and consequences are happening all around us. Not to say that public servants do not have impact. I believe they absolutely do, (that's why I do what I do) but they also live a weird office life and hide in plain sight from public scorn - everyone's favorite little whipping boys and girls.