Jo Hamya – författare

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.

A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN TIME, THE DAILY MAIL, THE INDEPENDENT, GOOD HOUSEKEEPING AND THE ATLANTIC

''A slippery, excellent exploration of sexual politics, creative appropriation, and family dynamics . . . It lands its ending with all the force of a sharp knife hurled at a bullseye'' VANITY FAIR

Sicily, 2010. Sophia, on the cusp of adulthood, spends a long hot summer with her father, a successful author. Over the course of that holiday, their relationship will fracture.

London, 2020. Sophia''s father, now 61, sits in a large theatre, surrounded by strangers, watching his daughter''s first play. A play that takes that Sicilian holiday as its subject and will force him to watch his purported crimes re-enacted. Set over the course of one climactic day, this is the story of a father and a daughter, of all that divides and binds them.

''Wickedly funny. A perfect novel'' SARAH BERNSTEIN

''Brilliant . . . With a precision of language that ought to make Hamya''s contemporaries quake and a tenderness you don''t see coming'' ATLANTIC

Brought to you by Penguin. 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, as Jo Hamya asks us to consider the true cost of living as a young person in 21st-century England.''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''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© Jo Hamya 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021