'What it said to me was that I was here again, I was back, back from the great nowhere of somewhere else, returned, all too officially, to the whereabouts of Moffa.'
After a year away, a woman arrives back in her hometown to keep an eye on her wayward mother, Moffa. Living in a precarious sub-let, she is always on edge, anticipating a visit from the landlord or the arrival of the other resident. But her thoughts also drift back to the rented room she has just left, now occupied by a new lodger she has never met, but whose imagined navigations within the house and home become her fascination.
The minor dramas of temporary living are prised open and ransacked in Holly Pester's irreverent reckoning with those who house us. This is a story about what it means to live and love within and outside of family structures. It is also a stunning first novel from a writer already hailed as one of the best poets of her generation.
Publisher: Granta Books
ISBN: 9781783789832
Number of pages: 224
Weight: 248 g
Dimensions: 219 x 135 x 16 mm
Holly Pester is a genius and The Lodgers gets into everything that matters - Kate Briggs
There is no one better than Holly Pester at communicating the eerie, sometimes hilarious and often hallucinatory experience of modern precarity. This is a novel for the age and for generation rent: a captivating and unforgettable account of how economic circumstance can lead to a feeling of being only half alive - Nathalie Olah
With tang and pith in every sentence, The Lodgers speaks to a generational epidemic of rootlessness and porous selfhood with vital wit and utter originality - AK Blakemore
A sad strange lyrical story of shame and displacement but whose strength will not let you go - Sheena Patel
This stylistically eccentric novel holds a pressing, political truth - Observer
The Lodgers is an elliptical take on the life of those we've come to think of as "generation rent" - Telegraph
The raging instability of the housing market and its impact on Generation Rent find rare poetic expression in this arresting debut... A novel that sharply captures the precarity of basic 21st-century living - Daily Mail
Funny, nightmarish and diffuse all at once, but always as sharp as a knife... Fizzing with the life it reflects and played for the blackest of laughs... Serious, sad and darkly comic - Guardian
Compelling... pleasingly weird... Holly Pester's background as a poet comes through in her visual descriptions - TLS
Thankyou to the publisher for my copy.
I was firmly engrossed from the first few pages, this was an easy, quick read and I could completely relate to the main character after living in various flats, studios and...
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An impressive debut novel from a writer (and academic) previously prize-shortlisted for her debut poetry collection “Comic Timing”.
It is told over 54 short chapters which alternate between two different...
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Superb, debut novel from Holly Pester. Often funny, philosophical, and relatable tale about temporary living accommodation, bringing with it an air of menace and uncertainty. A wonderful fresh voice for fiction.
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