Three Rooms

June 1, 2021

DEBUT Room one: An unnamed narrator has come to Oxford to work as a low-paid teaching assistant and rent a room in a shared house. The house, which has been endlessly repurposed from its grand 19th-century design, once belonged to the author and bon vivant Walter Pater, whose aesthetic philosophy interests the narrator. Room two is hardly a room. When her teaching assignment comes to an end, the narrator heads to London, where her minimum wage job copyediting a society magazine pays her only enough to afford a couch in the living room of her bossy roommate's apartment. After that contract ends, room three lives only in the narrator's imagination--a room of her own, in a home of her own where she might settle in, acquire some friends and furnishings, have a life. VERDICT In Brexit-era Britain, a generation of privileged, well-educated young people find themselves underemployed and just scraping by. Hamya paints a cloudy picture of the future for this generation, in a thoughtful novel about the increasingly elusive dream of home ownership.--Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.

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June 21, 2021
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. Agent: Harriet Moore, David Higham Assoc.

July 1, 2021
In this sharp portrait of contemporary life, a young literature scholar searches for meaning and financial independence in a post-art society. It's 2018 when our unnamed protagonist rents a room at Oxford during a between-term stint as a research assistant. Brexit looms large, as does the pressure to have a well-curated political opinion on Twitter. Surrounded by the glittery Oxford elite, the protagonist can table any growing concerns about the stability of her life. After her term at Oxford is up, she lands a temporary position with a high-society magazine in London and begins crashing on the sofa of a jewelry-making new flatmate. The flatmate has no qualms about playing the strict landlord, even as it becomes clear the flat is being financed by someone else. The end of the gig at the magazine leaves our heroine at a crossroads: find a third transient-housing situation and make it in the city, or go back to the drawing board. Hamya's debut, a tight story of privilege and neoliberalism, rakes the muck of a wealth-hoarding society.

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Starred review from August 1, 2021
A young woman seeks a foothold in the ugly, precarious world of post-Brexit England. As this distinctive debut novel opens, the unnamed 20-something narrator is moving into a rooming house in Oxford, a "repository for postdoctoral research assistants at the university" and formerly the home of 19th-century critic Walter Pater (so says the blue plaque by the front door). She's come here after almost a year of spotty freelance work and occasional help from her parents, but she yearns for more than just a furnished room: "the end goal I wanted, through any job necessary, was to be able to afford a flat, not just a room, and then to settle in it and invite friends to dinner." In the book's second part, however, we find she has moved even further from her objective--living in London, subletting a couch from the friend of a friend for 80 pounds per month, and working as a copy editor at a Tatler-like society magazine. All the while, the narrator notices and reflects on everything: university and office life; racism and anti-immigrant sentiment (readers learn, rather offhandedly, that she is a person of color); the rise of Boris Johnson to prime minister; the hulking remains of Grenfell Tower, where 72 largely immigrant residents were killed by fire. 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, whose A Room of One's Own provides the epigraph and the inspiration. Scintillating prose and sly social observation make this novel a tart pleasure.

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