Three Rooms
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- £7.99
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
Something about your generation I've noticed, she said not unkindly once I had fallen silent, is that you give up very easily.
Autumn 2018. A young woman starts a job as a research assistant at Oxford. But 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. As the summer rolls on, tensions with her flatmate escalate. She is overworked and underpaid, spends her free time calculating the increasing austerity in England through the rising cost of Freddos.
The prospects of a permanent job seem increasingly unlikely, until she finally asks herself: is it time to give up?
**A NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR **
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PRAISE FOR THREE ROOMS
'I was bowled over by this barbed, supple book...spiky, unsettling.' OLIVIA LAING
'Cool, sharp and perceptive' Stylist
'Crisp and resonant' New Statesman
'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
'Resigned to renting forever and feeling guilty every time you buy a cup of coffee? You'll want to read Jo Hamya's urgent and intelligent debut' EVENING STANDARD
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hamya's cerebral debut explores a young British woman's identity formation while her country is besieged by inequality, disconnection, and political instability. In the fall of 2018, the unnamed narrator, a millennial woman of color, has just moved into student accommodations at Oxford for a temporary research assistant position. Trying to find her footing, she spends most of her time online, contemplating how others manage their online personae, such as a student named Ghislane, whose father recorded a hit "faux-folk" song of the same name in the 1990s ("Ghislane was not as famous as her father," the narrator notes, perusing her Instagram profile, "but there were the beginnings of some distinction there"). Later, the narrator moves to London and scrapes by while working yet another temporary job at a society magazine with a pitiful salary. As Brexit divides the nation, she reflects on the changing cultural climate and the purposelessness of her toils: "When did it become ridiculous to think that a stable economy and a fair housing market were reasonable expectations?" In precise prose, Hamya captures the disillusionment and despair plaguing her protagonist. This perceptive debut will delight fans of Rachel Cusk.