Jo Hamya

A piercing howl of a novel about one young woman's endless quest for an apartment of her own and the aspirations and challenges faced by the Millennial generation as it finds its footing in the world, from a shockingly talented debut author.

Three Rooms

What happens when we stop idolising the generations above us? Stop idolising our own parents? What happens when we become frightened of the generations below us? Frightened of our own children? The Aeolian islands, 2010. Sophia, on the cusp of adulthood, spends a long hot summer with her father in Sicily. There she falls in love for the first time. There she works as her father's amanuensis, typing the novel he dictates, a story about sex and gender divides. There, their relationship fractures. London, Summer 2020. Sophia's father, a 61-year-old novelist who does not feel himself to be a bad or outdated person sits in a large theatre, surrounded by strangers, watching his daughter's first play. A play that takes that Sicilian holiday is its subject. A play that will force him to watch his purported crimes play out in front of him.

The Hypocrite

'A furious encapsulation of Generation Rent.' OLIVIA LAING, NEW STATESMAN BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2021 'Cool, sharp and perceptive.' Stylist What is the true cost of living as a young person in 21st-century England? It's autumn 2018 and a young woman moves into a rented room in university accommodation, ready to begin a job as a research assistant at Oxford. Here, living and working in the spaces that have birthed the country's leaders, she is both outsider and insider, and she can't shake the feeling that real life is happening elsewhere. Eight months later she finds herself in London. She's landed a temp contract at a society magazine and is paying £80 a week to sleep on a stranger's sofa. Summer rolls on and England roils with questions around its domestic civil rights: Brexit, Grenfell, climate change, homelessness. Meanwhile, tensions with her flatmate escalate, she is overworked and underpaid, and the prospects of a permanent job seem increasingly unlikely, until finally she has to ask herself: what is this all for? Incisive, original and brilliantly observed, Three Rooms is the story of a search for a home and for a self. Driven by despair and optimism in equal measure, the novel poignantly explores politics, race and belonging. 'From the first paragraph, I was hooked... There's quiet, raw power in this book and its author.' COURTTIA NEWLAND, OBSERVER BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2021 'A phenomenal achievement.' The Times 'One of the most candid and subtle explorations of class by an English novelist in recent years.' TLS 'A biting dissection of privilege, race, inequality and ideology in 21st century Britain.' i 'Jo Hamya is an exceptionally gifted writer...slowly but surely broke my heart.' CLAIRE-LOUISE BENNETT 'Intelligent, melancholy, funny and subtle.' CHRIS POWER 'Both spectral and steeped in contemporary reality.' OLIVIA SUDJIC

Ellena Savage

Rebecca May Johnson

Tessa Hadley

Roger Deakin

Caleb Azumah Nelson

Jamal Mahjoub

Amy Key

Amy-Jane Beer

Michael Malay

Niellah Arboine

Marchelle Farrell

Essays from the Water's Edge

By the River

A piercing howl of a novel and "a tart pleasure...with echoes of Zadie Smith and Sally Rooney," about one young woman’s endless quest for an apartment of her own and the aspirations and challenges faced by the Millennial generation as it finds its footing in the world, from a shockingly talented debut author (Kirkus, starred review). “A woman must have money and a room of one’s own.” So said Virginia Woolf in her classic A Room of One’s Own, but in this scrupulously observed, gorgeously wrought debut novel, Jo Hamya pushes that adage powerfully into the twenty-first century, to a generation of people living in rented rooms. What a woman needs now is an apartment of her own, the ultimate mark of financial stability, unattainable for many. Set in one year, Three Rooms follows a young woman as she moves from a rented room at Oxford, where she’s working as a research assistant; to a stranger’s sofa, all she can afford as a copyediting temp at a society magazine; to her childhood home, where she’s been forced to return, jobless, even a room of her own out of reach. As politics shift to nationalism, the streets fill with protestors, and news drip-feeds into her phone, she struggles to live a meaningful life on her own terms, unsure if she’ll ever be able to afford to do so.

Jo Hamya

Books

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