Three Rooms

Genre: Literary Fiction

Release Date: Expected 8th July 2021

Eight months ago, a young woman began her life - moving into her renting university living space and ready to start her new job as a research assistant at Oxford. All around her, she can feel the energy from the previous residents who became leaders and pioneers - and it almost doesn't feel like real life at all.

But now everything is different - she's sleeping on a strangers sofa in London, temping at a magazine and things don't appear to be getting better. She's no closer to a stable job or home, she's overworked and underpaid, and the world around her is falling apart - Brexit is dividing the nation, Grenfell tower burned, the city is rife with homelessness and despair and the climate is changing beyond repair. And as every day passes by, she begins to question what this is all really for.

Our nameless, faceless narrator was cold and detatched - an almost clinic approach to storytelling that made me feel like an observer to a social experiment rather than a reader. Three Rooms had a strange monotony and boredom throughout - the kind that makes your stomach ache and it felt uncomfortably familiar. The entire book read like a stream of thoughts, but with very long strings of text with no pauses for air or punctuation which at times was not enjoyable but didn't detract too much.

Hamya has captured the despair and nihilism of young people who feel like their futures are devoid of hope - even our nameless narrator may seem on the surface like she's fine, working for a society magazine and living in the capital city - but even her life is barely held together and being pulled apart by the world we are living in.

Three Rooms was a darkly uncomfortable truth about the complexities of class, race, politics and the thousands of things that make our identity.


RATING: ⭐⭐⭐⭐


Thank you to Jo Hamya, Random House UK and NetGalley for this ARC in return for an honest review.

Three Rooms by Jo Hamya is about a young woman who doesn't quite know what she's doing with her life and is struggling with disillusionment about her career and her ambitions for home ownership. Insightful and engaging.

Three Rooms is a novel about a young woman looking for stability in 21st century life as she drifts through a transitory year. In autumn 2018 an unnamed narrator moves into a rented room in a shared university house in Oxford, ready to take up a temporary research assistant position, but she spends most of her time scrolling Twitter and watching one of the only people she's met do things on Instagram. When the contract ends, she finds herself in London, living on someone's sofa and doing another temporary job at a society magazine. Once again, she feels disconnected, and as politics rolls on in the background, she considers what she can do next.

Told in the first person in a literary style with very few named characters, Three Rooms is the sort of book some people will love and others not get along with. I enjoyed it, with its clever look at privilege, class, and race, and the complications of these as the narrator takes up temporary jobs doing things from a rarified world, straddling the line between having no money and still having the ability to get a temp job at a posh magazine. I also liked the engagement with books, from the stuff about Walter Pater and Instagram to a glib commentary on modern novels which feels like it's pointing out this book could be classed as another of them.

As it's set at a very specific time and has a lot of politics and current events run through it, at times you do feel like there's a bit too much Brexit going on, but that is also important to the general look at the Oxford and London worlds that provide the backdrop for a lot of the people ruling those decisions. As a fleeting first person novel, there aren't really answers to the issues raised, but more a look at a version of millennial existence.

I have lived in both the locations in the novel in vaguely similar circumstances, which made me drawn into the character and narrative perhaps more than I might've been, and there are a lot of little details that bring these locations and the protagonist's existence to life. Three Rooms presents a clash not only between sides in political issues, but also between ways in which someone can be privileged and not, and between real life and the internet.