Valid Until

She writes Europe's laws. Her contract expires with a man's mandate.Andreea Vlaicu drafts the amendments, the position papers and the speeches that go out under the name of a Member of the European Parliament. She is very good at it. She is told so, at a fixed rate, in all seasons.She is also an accredited parliamentary assistant, which means her employment ends automatically on the day her Member stops being a Member - on a date printed in the Treaty, in an election in which she cannot stand. Every five years the badge deactivates at midnight, and four hundred people go looking, in cafés within six hundred metres of the Place du Luxembourg, for somebody willing to accredit them.Over nine years and two Members - one indifferent, one unbearably decent - Andreea learns exactly what the arrangement costs, what it buys, and where its ceiling is. She learns it from a promotion note that is entirely accurate and entirely damning. From a working group convened after a scandal, whose report she is asked to write. From a colleague on the seventh floor with no window, no ambition and a contract nobody can take from him.And from a potted plant in the corner of the office, which has an inventory number, a condition assessment, and rights she does not.Valid Until is a comedy of institutional manners about the machinery of European power - about a place where nothing is ever hidden, everything is written down, and the correctness does the concealing.For readers of Jonathan Coe, Barbara Pym and John Lanchester. Set in a Brussels that no guidebook describes.