Overview

"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 ""A woman must have money and a room of her 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 over the course of 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."

Full Product Details

9780358695318

Table of Contents

Reviews

I was bowled over by this barbed, supple book about precarity and power, both for its spiky, unsettling intelligence and the frank beauty of the writing. --Olivia Laing, author of The Lonely City and Everybody Jo Hamya is an exceptionally gifted writer. Her portrait of a bright young woman struggling to get a foothold in an indifferent world is acute, informed, and deeply felt. Three Rooms slowly but surely broke my heart. --Claire-Louise Bennett, author of Pond With sentences so stunning and sharp, Jo Hamya's Three Rooms devastatingly portrays the unrelenting nature of attempting to survive amidst the noise and the constraints of contemporary life. I loved this book for its grace and its confidence and for its continued unwillingness to look away. --Lynn Steger Strong, author of Want Three Rooms is brilliant, and brilliant in new ways. Jo Hamya's writing is full of unexpected angles and original, vivid approaches; it's intelligent, melancholy, funny, and subtle. --Chris Power, author of A Lonely Man and Mothers A meticulous portrait of a hostile present drawn from a year spent haunting others' houses, Hamya's prose is both spectral and steeped in contemporary reality--a slow but sure burn. --Olivia Sudjic, author of Sympathy A stunning achievement. Three Rooms is both assertion and interrogation: of the world, our immediate landscape, ourselves. Hamya's writing is silken, delicate yet tough, successfully bearing the weight of deft observations that unsettle, even while they bear witness. Her assured candor is awe-inspiring, truth-telling rarely feels so immersive, so enjoyable a read. I'm full of curious excitement about what she'll write in the future. In every way possible, Three Rooms is a novel for our times. --Courttia Newland, author of A River Called Time and screenwriter for Steve McQueen's Small Axe films Three Rooms is a masterpiece of attentiveness. Hamya's rooms are not just filled with furniture, air and light, but with social codes and gestures, politics, privileges and precarities; they are rooms filled with all the clatter and pressure and bullshit of the infosphere, and the exhausting acclivity of trying to find a meaningful home within it, or just somewhere vaguely affordable to live. Incisive, funny, sad and true: I felt every thought of it. --Jack Underwood, author of Not Even This

Author Information

JO HAMYA has an English degree from King's College London and a MSt in contemporary literature and culture from Oxford University. She has worked as a copyeditor for Tatler and a freelance manuscript editor. She has also written for the Financial Times. Three Rooms is her first novel.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available