Three rooms - Jo Hamya

'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