Three Rooms

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

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

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

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.

OLIVIA SUDJIC

Hamya is razor-sharp on what it means for a young woman to try and make their way in a world delineated by privilege, (still) dominated by those with the 'right' connections.

The Bookseller *Editor's Choice*

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

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 candour 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

An intelligent, original examination of privilege and belonging in 21st-century England. Its account of thwarted progress proves absorbing, enriched as it is by shrewd observations and insightful meditations on the trials of modern life and the state of the nation.

Economist

A biting dissection of privilege, race, inequality and ideology in 21st-century Britain.

i

This incisive, acerbic meditation on possession, politics and privilege is among the summer's hottest debuts.

Madeleine Feeny, Culture Whisper

Biting and truthful ... A polemical novel, in a tradition of women writing about the cost of freedom that includes Woolf and leads to novelists such as Deborah Levy and Rachel Cusk ... [it] also belongs to a new genre of socially realist writing about millennial poverty and what it does to women's ambitions.

Shahidha Bari, Guardian

A phenomenal achievement. Perfectly judged set pieces at parties, offices and art galleries are infused with the illuminating and inquiring mind of an author who watches our society with an unflinching x-ray eye and tells its stories back to us with elegance and wit. And that, surely, is the mark of an excellent writer.

Melissa Katsoulis, The Times

Three Rooms is one of the most candid and subtle explorations of class by an English novelist in recent years. Hamya writes with a Cuskian pellucidity, but confronts capital and the precariat in a way Cusk never does, in its many smudgy, insidious forms. This is a novel about bumping against the walls of the life you've be told to build and finding the doors locked.

Stephanie Sy-Quia, Times Literary Supplement

A brave, experimental debut... Jo Hamya possesses a powerful and powerfully enquiring intellect.

Michael Donkor

Fascinating and insightful...a profound, well-written and relatable novel that expertly captures the mood of a generation.

Molly Hunter, UK Press Syndication

[With] sharpness of observation... Hamya cherishes detail... [and] gives a vivid and persuasive picture of life as lived by highly intelligent well-educated young people today... Jo Hamya is a very talented writer.

Allan Massie, Scotsman

A vital look at the precarity felt by many millennials.

Jessie Thompson, Evening Standard

A prismatic portrait of British life and millennial angst emerges, with echoes of Zadie Smith and Sally Rooney, but the presiding spirit of the novel is Virginia Woolf... Scintillating prose and sly social observation make this novel a tart pleasure.

Kirkus Review

A furious encapsulation of Generation Rent.

Olivia Laing, New Statesman, *Books of the Year*

From the first paragraph, I was hooked. Tension drips through every scene and Hamya depicts London so well.

Courttia Newland, Observer, *Books of the Year*