Three Rooms

A piercing howl of a novel and "a tart pleasure...with echoes of Zadie Smith and Sally Rooney," about one young womans endless quest for an apartment of her own and the aspirations and challenges faced by the Millennial generation as it finds its footing in the world, from a shockingly talented debut author (Kirkus, starred review).

"A woman must have money and a room of ones own." So said Virginia Woolf in her classic A Room of Ones Own, but in this scrupulously observed, gorgeously wrought debut novel, Jo Hamya pushes that adage powerfully into the twenty-first century, to a generation of people living in rented rooms. What a woman needs now is an apartment of her own, the ultimate mark of financial stability, unattainable for many.

Set in one year, Three Rooms follows a young woman as she moves from a rented room at Oxford, where shes working as a research assistant; to a strangers sofa, all she can afford as a copyediting temp at a society magazine; to her childhood home, where shes been forced to return, jobless, even a room of her own out of reach. As politics shift to nationalism, the streets fill with protestors, and news drip-feeds into her phone, she struggles to live a meaningful life on her own terms, unsure if shell ever be able to afford to do so.