This is a reflection by a young mix-race Generation Z woman trying to find her place in the era of Brexit politics, the ubiquitous smartphone and anxieties of always being 'on' and keeping up with her peers. Limping from one short-term contract to another and sleeping in rented rooms and on sofas without a place to call her own (a take on Virginia Woolf's famous essay) her life progression appears to go backwards instead of forwards, as she returns to her mother's house without a job or income. A mirror on the plight of many of her generation.

Many thanks to Jonathan Cape and NetGalley, UK for my ARC.

Three Rooms focuses on an unnamed narrator attempting to traverse academic life.

We meet a cast of characters alongside her, and see how she interacts with them, usually struggling to find common ground. There’s a great deal of political and academic discourse, which aren’t subjects I find particularly engrossing in fiction.

Hamya gives us commentary on belonging, on finding a place which feels like home, on race and class. All important topics, all very in need of being spoken about in media. I just felt horrible underwhelmed, possibly by the writing style, possibly by the subject matter.

This wasn’t my usual type of read, but I can see why it would be important and interesting for others. It just didn’t work for me.

There will be many who identify with the unnamed narrator, a well-educated young woman of colour, as she seeks a place to be herself, to call her own, in a housing market designed for the financially well off. Finding herself, over and again, misunderstood, patronised, ignored and misrepresented, she is understandably furious. Through her central character, Jo Hamya explores important aspects of our very unequal British society and certainly prompts the reader to think about them: Brexit; the environment; low pay; poor housing; our dependence on social media. There are moments when her writing style segues into that of a newspaper article and feels overtly didactic.
Nevertheless, Hamya writes well and her literary references are entirely in line with her character’s interests, whilst also reminding the reader of our rich cultural heritage. In placing her central character in Walter Pater’s Oxford house, is she suggesting that we judge her own work on its innate style rather than its moral or educational value? If this is the case, Hamya has not entirely succeeded for whilst her prose is elegant and her depictions of contemporary life vivid and recognisable, her angry, despondent heroine’s thoughts present her in lecture mode throughout. We cannot escape her bad-tempered view of everything and this makes ‘Three Rooms’ an exhausting read. Perhaps that is what this author is aiming to achieve – we must share the pain.
My thanks to NetGalley and Random House, UK Vintage for a copy of this novel in exchange for a fair review.

The first 3 to 5 pages of this book were painful, but I am glad I persevered because the rest of this novel was actually good. Jo Hamya puts a lot of emphasis on style - not really above substance, but above a plot definitely. I don't think everyone will love this book but I found it enjoyable. The heroine - an unnamed woman of colour in England - describes a year in Oxford, in rented accommodation, some time in London sleeping on a stranger's sofa, and moving back home. It is depressing to read, especially if you are also someone in your late twenties, early thirties, educated, who aspires to have your own place - only to realise that despite a good education, jobs are scarce and will never pay enough for you to afford a house deposit. Money - and class - are the big topics here, the narrator describing how she "scrimp[s] and save[s], swapped a £2.35 Americano for a 99p filter coffee", just to afford living.

"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 and invite friends for dinner".

The author pokes fun at the recent novels, in which "the protagonist was always a woman, and always sad. (...) This protagonist had oblique, troubled relationships with men and spent a lot of the book's plot doing only one thing, but doing it well: sleeping, driving, smoking, going on holiday, or having conversations at length".
This novel is somewhat different - men only appearing as snotty neighbours, condescending bosses or taxi drivers; the heroine just spending her time trying to arrange whatever space she occupies to make it her own, and envying other people's spaces: her flatmate's parents' house, with their Jo Malone handsoap, the Molton Brown shower gel, the tasteful decoration.

Brexit looms - not exactly in the background, but as a reminder that things these days are just... a bit grim. There is a sense of hopelessness, of never being able to move and being always in a precarious situation: "Where I was going, I would still have to share the bathroom, be conscious of the length of my showers; suffer interruptions of thought if I had to make breakfast in the kitchen, or explain where I had been after leaving the house."

It's a very millennial book - the kind mother of her flatmate commenting on her generation "giving up too easily" and reminding her she has had to work "very hard" to afford her beautiful home. As I was reading, and the catastrophes piled up - no affordable housing, low wages, Brexit, Grenfell, the environment and the protests - I was nearly expecting Covid to appear, like the icing on the cake, but it thankfully didn't.

Overall I enjoyed its unapologetic gloom and the lack of resolution - without spoiling the book, I left it not feeling overly optimistic for the narrator. It was grim. The writing was at times a bit too opaque to my liking, not exactly lyrical but trying very hard to be deep and clever. It mostly worked - for me.

The premise of this novel caught my attention because I felt some sympathy with it, which is to say I had understood the main premise to be about the unaffordability of housing for the young, however this novel is at times depressing as well as angry, and although it is intriguing, I’m not sure I enjoyed it as such. The main character rents an expensive yet plain room in a superb location, followed by a lowly sofa, but she’s landed in short succession two privileged jobs. Badly paid in money but rich in experience. It is not easy to walk into jobs of this kind and I know after struggling to get work after studying, so I didn’t really recognise this as particularly underprivileged. But then, the exploitation of interns/young staff members on low salaries or impermanent contracts did hit home.

I found the writing style interesting but annoying. There are frequent repetitions and the flow is jagged, breaking engagement with what is going on. The prose jumps from internal musings to actual happenings to other people’s recollections of random things. It isn’t always clear why the narration is hopping to a particular thing. I didn’t really enjoy reading about the period of the Brexit uncertainty; as a topic it felt both too old and not old enough to rehash. Then there’s the narrator. It is impossible to start to feel any sympathy with her because we aren’t really introduced to her and know next to nothing about her; even one of the other characters mentions that she barely talks and that others don’t remember her. I’m sure this is meant to be a witty reflection on how we are all living in bubbles with less meaningful interaction, but I just really didn’t engage with her plights as a result of the fact that she’s an unknown entity. Yet I just spent an entire book in the head of this woman.

The book did nicely reflect a sort of transitional nature which modern life often has. But I don’t think this really hit home for me in the way I was expecting.

My thanks to #NetGalley & Jonathan Cape, for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

A light satire about a young woman unable to make a life for herself and suffering from rejection from the places where she tries to make a home.

The book's protagonist remains unnamed and detached from the telling of her story; as she drifts in and out of situations she fails to take control and passively goes through life being unable to make any real connections to other people and places.

The sense of being thrown out of places where you belong for a time, such as her time in oxford and as a dogsbody at a society magazine is well defined, but the inclusion of much talk about brexit and particular but unnamed politicians give the book a very temporary feel and dates it immediately.

A despairing story of a young woman with no clue as to how to proceed in the adult world and who ultimately has the backup of returning to a comfortable family home, there is too little that really helps the reader connect with the story or with the characters, and despite some fairly big exploration of contemporary issues, for me it never really hits home.

I fully expected to love this book, since it describes a familiar type of experience: a young woman wandering from one rented room to another, trying to embark upon a career at least halfway worthy of her education. The narrator is made to feel even worse because of Brexit, because of her race, because of the hostile political forces she senses all around her. She does not wish to compromise like the intern she sees at the magazine she temps for, simply for the sake of fitting in. In the Clore Gallery, looking at a room full of Turners, she realises the troubled relationship she has with her country, the patriotism fanned by BBC dramas and generic painterly landscapes, how much she wants to love it but how the news cycle tells her otherwise. Reminded me of Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy - driven by the intellect rather than by the heart.

"What had a rented room in Oxford and a sofa in London made me? Where had there been to make me? For all my plans, it seemed impossible I could achieve anything. There had been no place I could have dragged a sofa into, painted the walls whatever colour I wanted, stayed in long enough to find inviting colleagues over for dinner and drinks a worthwhile task. I had not found a job with which I could afford to put my life in one place, then nurture my relationship with family and friends. Yet somehow, I had spent the year keeping my possessions, temporarily, in what were ostensibly the highest echelons the country had to offer"

This relatively brief novel, described by the author as “about the danger of withholding capital, principally domestic and financial” is set in Oxford and London in a year starting in September 2018.

It is (like so many other novels these days it seems) narrated by an unnamed first person narrator. In this case the narrator is a young (I think) mixed-race woman.

We follow her in three separate sections – representing the three rooms of the title.

In the first she is a teaching assistant at Oxford University – staying in a (I think real life) house once occupied by the siblings Walter (an author) and Clara (a pioneer of Women’s education) Pater, but now broken into multiple rooms occupied by post docs and research assistants. There she mixes in rather elite circles and forms an obsession with a student, famous as the daughter of a pop star who wrote a best selling song about his wife leaving him (and named his daughter after the wife and song).

In the second, her teaching at an end, she gets an insecure position as an copy-editist at a society magazine in London, and hangs around Bloomsbury, while paying to sleep on the sofa of a dilapidated flat - her “landlord” being a bookseller and jewellery maker.

In the third and briefest section, having lost that position also and unable to live in London any longer, she visits a Turner exhibition at the Tate, then takes an Uber to Euston before the train journey to the country where she is reluctantly returning to her parents offer (one they have been baffled for some time she has not taken) of her old bedroom in the family house.

While all this is going on – the author, like many of her generation, feels increasingly alienated by the new country being assembled by the proceedings of another house – the House of Commons – following the, to her incomprehensible, Brexit vote two years previously.

She also spend time in another room – the room of the internet – as she follows the rise and fall of various (mainly of course Oxford educated) politicians.

"Quickly, I realised the absurd wealth of the places I had been in over the past year: rooms in which such discussions could be played with in theory, without urgency, at any time, and then set aside to be taken up at a later date. The internet was one such room: a constant, useless distress in my pocket. I had resolved to stop looking at my phone if I could help it; to turn off my notifications and live less theoretically."

The irony of her position – and the oddness of the juxtaposition of her milieu and both her circumstances and political views - is spelled out by many of those around her

"Don’t you think it’s weird that you spent a year giving yourself to the place that started the careers of people that openly disdain you, and now you’ve gone to work for a publication that exalts them?"

But I was unclear where the reader’s sympathies are meant to lie – many if not most of the criticisms seem to have their own “check your privilege” issues (typically white with some form of security). And the narrator herself seems unbelievably tone deaf in a conversation she has with cleaner “what’s the plan after cleaning” being an opening gambit.

At one stage the narrator discusses a certain type of novel written by women – in a passage which seems to refer to Moshfegh’s “A Year of Rest and Relaxation” and later to what at least made me think of Cusk’s “Transit” “A central character in one of the books equated the dishevelment of her inner life with the renovation of her house for 260 pages" and the Uber ride in the final chapter reads very much like a Cusk-ian tale as the driver regales the narrator with the story of a row he had with his art-industry wife when he stated that the Twitter outrage over Tate paying more for a “head of coffee” than its exhibition curaters was actually misplaced as the coffee job had “more pride and practical use . than is any of the posturing and simpering and affectation he saw in the art world”

Of these novels the narrator remarks “The protagonist was inevitably compared to the author. This last thing was what made these books popular: it was revolutionary for a woman to spend 250 pages looking at herself in some way” – which is of course a challenge to us to do the same (or perhaps not do the same here).

But what is one meant to do – when the narrator (working at the society magazine) discusses jobs with her flatmate who works at a bookshop with an owner paid in the millions and living comfortably in a town house who implies his minimum paid workers should feel honoured to work in bookselling – and then one reads that the author has worked at Tatler magazine and Waterstones.

The book is explicitly influenced by (and takes an epigraph from) Virginia Woolf’s “Room of One’s Own”. Woolf of course famously said "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction"– a quote which, particularly as it was given at Cambridge University in 1928, could hardly be said to show much in the way of perspective or real understanding of the real world and privilege. And I was struggling with similar ideas in this book. Cambridge replaced by Oxford, and some form of requirement to be able to afford to live in London – by a narrator from elsewhere in England - as a basic human right.

The Oxford section was by far the weakest for me – I felt like it needed both a knowledge of Oxford and its University traditions (one that did not even work for a Cambridge graduate) as well as some kind of sympathy for the characters portrayed. For the life of me I could also not work out what I was meant to make of the choice to name the pop star’s daughter (who reappears again in the second section) Ghislaine – with such obviously odd connotations given her developments as a socialite and daughter of a famous person. I paused the book a number of times before deciding to move ahead to the other sections.

More generally I often could not work out if the book was a satire of woke, generation-rent, zero-hours, gig-economy millennials, a defense of them or something in between. In some ways it feels like a novel about the new "working class" that represents Labour's core votes and their economic struggles and at the same time as a novel which encapsulates everything "red wall" voters fear about the party's direction.

So overall an interesting book but one with which I felt I lacked a full connection.

This taut and short book is focused around a woman navigating working in the uncertain times of the moment- concerns around Brexit, the incompetence and malice of the government, Grenfell Tower, house price inflation and more- and how she is never quite able to shake it off.

Indeed, it seems at times as if everybody around her is denying the very reality she sees for herself. When she is working at Oxford, she is aware that her degree and role afford her luxuries that many others would not have, but her work still feels stifling and precarious.

Then she moves to London and is at the mercy of terrible work conditions that she is told to just put up with if she wants to get ahead, despite sleeping on a couch for £80 a week. During this, she is reminded regularly of her 'luck'- at having a job that keeps on forgetting to pay her despite her absurdly long hours, at being in London, at having 'beaten the system' by being a woman of colour who has 'made it' because she went to Oxford.

At times, I found it quite hard to get inside the narrator's head- she can feel quite cold and stiff throughout, but I guess that is the point- she is so concerned with trying to 'make it', whatever 'it' is, that she has no time to be at ease. It is a really interesting look into the burnout of the current work model, and how we have still not at all reckoned with it.

Well written short novel about life for a young person in 21st-century England, Once finishing university, it's almost impossible to find a permanent job, and then one that pays well enough to get a place of your own so you can stop sleeping on someone else's sofa. It's about a sense of self, home and belonging, about Brexit and politics, the Grenfell tower fire, race, class, and so much more. I have to admit that he first part did not always hold my attention, but a very impressive debut nonetheless.
Thank you Jonathan Cape and Netgalley for the ARC.

I often don't love such clearly political novels but I found this one very interesting - as well as important and insightful. It is full of anger, but never loses sense of the characters, or the wider themes of being a human in this world.

"Well excuse me, I exhaled, but a party is only a good one if you invite other people in, you know?"

I'm genuinely torn with the book. I've read both valid criticisms and uncritical praise, but I do believe the book is enjoyable at surface level. It offers the reader insight into very real class issues, Brexit for the 48% and the overwhelming battles many graduates face when acclimatising into the world of employment. Jo successfully delivered a book that managed to look at the uncomfortable settings of British politics and a very bleak outlook on the country post-EU referendum. It wasn't what I expected, nor was it something I wished to rehash - I recall vividly living through that time. But nonetheless, the book still delivers something, even if it's simply someone critiquing their own class whilst pretending to be from a working class background.

There were valid criticisms of social media and the rise of fake news, but sadly a lot of these were wasted on me, as they were dotted between literature references outside of my knowledge. Additionally, many of these thoughts were lost between unrelated descriptions as quotation marks were missing for an unexplained reason. I'm hoping this was merely a formatting error and will be changed but perhaps this style is in fashion for the literature elite.

I found the protagonist's self obsession and lack of awareness interesting when juxtaposed against literally everyone else in the book. She is repeatedly reminded that sadness isn't a personality and to get over herself, yet appears to reject this advice at every turn. Her wallowing almost turns her very real and genuine criticisms of the bleak British experience into satire, as it is clear to everyone except the protagonist that she is very fortunate. She repeatedly falls into good situations, stumbling upon individuals who seemingly take her under their wings for no reason and repeatedly rejects their efforts to include her.

I can't decide ultimately. Perhaps the author created a truly unlikeable protagonist to highlight the rise of unhappy middle-class Brits who don't realise how lucky they are? Perhaps the entire book is satire and just as we see the main point of view scoff at others, we are just as guilty for scoffing at her? I really can't decide, but whilst I appreciate what I perceive to be the intended delivery, the book fell short for me.

Thank you #netgalley for the ARC.

This novel felt like a self-indulgent, badly written autofiction to me. Would work a lot better as a short collection of essays. The narrative ‘tone’ didn’t work for me. I appreciate the writer trying to explore the political/societal issues/ideas in the novel, but most of it felt too dated and underdeveloped. But most of all, it didn’t blend in well with the characters’ stories/lives. It felt unconvincing, and it was hard to feel anything for any of the characters. It felt discordant, like badly made music. This made the narrator/protagonist even more unbearable as if they’ve just made being ‘woke’ their personality – which then makes them borderline being unbearably pretentious.

Thanks to Vintage for letting me read Three Rooms in advance. This is a novel about the precarity of renting and forging a life for yourself in untenable economic circumstances, set against the backdrop of Brexit Britain. The narrator inhabits a bedsit in Oxford and a sofa in London, and tries to survive on badly paid and unstable jobs. I really enjoyed it - it's carefully written, with numerous thinly disguised references to the real world (loved the paragraphs that were so clearly describing the life of a Waterstones bookseller), and it explores so many themes I enjoy reading about: class, negotiating your twenties, the dichotomy of life in London. Of course, there is the caveat that the narrator comes from a comfortable background, so she is not at risk of falling through the cracks as so many other people are! I suppose my only complaint is that I always prefer novels to have politics in the background, rather than the foreground; the point of this book is the narrator's exclusion from traditional domestic spaces and how contemporary politics has led to this state. I'm all for politics underpinning narratives - it is vital, in lots of books! - but I always prefer it when the politics is part of (and secondary to) the story, instead of the main point.

Three Rooms is a modernist millennial novel, taut and simmering with tension. The prose flows like stream of consciousness, although in true modernist style it's also heavily weighted with academic and literary allusions.

In many ways inspired by A Room of One's Own, Hamya touches on themes of freedom, privilege and the cost of living in contemporary Britain. It's also a complex exploration of the powerlessness of social-political consciousness in the age of social media.

Three Rooms is a novel that takes itself seriously, and while it won't be for everyone, Hamya brings a bold new voice to contemporary British literature.

This book went way over my head. It was style over substance as far as the plot was concerned and was often too vague making me feel slightly disorientated. And yet another book with no speech marks - argh! I prefer literature that wants to tell you things through expansive characterisation and engaging plot on top of well-constructed language rather than a dry essay in the guise of a novel. Not an enjoyable read for me I'm afraid.
With thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for this digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Although quite depressing, this book is a beautiful insight into a woman in her twenties, coping with finding herself, a job and some place to live in without rent eating up half of her earnings. And so much Brexit talk.

Three Rooms sees an unnamed narrator of colour barely scraping a living over a year in which the fallout of the EU referendum and the Grenville Tower disaster are a background hum. Her first room is in Oxford where she takes up a short teaching assistant contract with little enthusiasm, becoming mildly obsessed with the daughter of a fading rock star who devotes more time to her Instagram account than her studies. Once her time is up, she moves her meagre possessions to a flat where she’s rented a sofa, taking another brief contract at a society fashion magazine, speaking only to her colleagues and her flatmate. When the contract ends, she has little option but to give in to her mother’s pleas to come home, contemplating Tate Britain's Turner collection in her third room before catching the train, Throughout it all, our narrator has left little or no impression, either on her surroundings or the people she's met.

Events marking the politically turbulent year beginning in the late summer 2018 provide a sharply observed backdrop against which Hamya explores privilege and inequality, both intergenerational and socioeconomic, racism and xenophobia. Our narrator is a bystander rather than a participant which the novel’s coolly distant, rather formal style smartly emphasises. In some ways Three Rooms is set in similar territory to Natasha Brown’s extraordinarily powerful Assembly. Of the two I prefer Brown’s novella, but it did set the bar extremely high

Interesting, insightful and uncomfortable, this book is a 21st century Virginia Woolf. It describes and observes what life is like today for a well educated, ambitious, hard-working but not well connected young person, unable to put down roots due to the transitory nature of the work they do and the lack of affordable accommodation. This feeling of detachment is enhanced by not naming the first person narrator nor most of the other characters, who the main character refers so by monikers such as “neighbour” or “intern”, with the exception of the highly well-connected Ghislaine, whose life passes through the narrator’s as an example of extreme privilege and a sharp contrast to hers. A literary novel in which not a lot happens, where relationships and friendships are superficial and feelings suppressed, but which is nonetheless highly perceptive and well observed. Likely to resonate with a lot of millennials. With thanks to the author, NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read an advance copy.

<i>Three Rooms</i> is a novel that (accurately?) explores the cost of living in 21st-century England as a twenty something. The novel is split into three sections - three rooms that the unnamed narrator lives in during the course of the book. <i>Three Rooms</i> is set in front of the backdrop of Brexit and politics and is a novel about belonging and the price of trying to find your place.

The novel's unnamed protagonist is a literature graduate going from job to job and city to city struggling with the cost of modern living. Perhaps for this reason the novel hit a little too close to home at times. However, the protagonist is absent of a name or a personality and at times it was hard to sympathize with this generic millennial character.

Jo Hamya's writing priorities style over character and is reminiscent of the work of Rachel Cusk or Deborah Levy, two writers I love.

Jo Hamya's novel is part of a modern genre of satire with honest and intellectual prose. Similar in style to novels such as <i>The New Me</i> by Halle Butler and <i>My Year of Rest and Relaxation</i> by Ottessa Moshfegh, which itself got a notable mention in <i>Three Rooms</i>.

ARC provided by NetGalley and Penguin Random House in exchange for an honest review.