Three Rooms

Name: Three Rooms
Brand: Harper Audio
Availability: InStock
Author: Jo Hamya
ISBN: 9780358653165

Author: Jo Hamya

Narrator: Jing Lusi

Unabridged: 5 hr 46 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Mariner Books

Published: 08/31/2021

Categories: Fiction, Literary Fiction, City Life, Women

Synopsis

A piercing howl of a novel and "a tart pleasure...with echoes of Zadie Smith and Sally Rooney," about one young woman’s 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 one’s own.” So said Virginia Woolf in her classic A Room of One’s 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 she’s working as a research assistant; to a stranger’s sofa, all she can afford as a copyediting temp at a society magazine; to her childhood home, where she’s 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 she’ll ever be able to afford to do so.

About Jo Hamya

JO HAMYA was born in London in 1997. After living in Miami for a few years, she completed an English degree at King’s College London and a MSt in contemporary literature and culture at Oxford University. There, she divided her research between updating twentieth-century cultural theory into twenty-first-century digital contexts, and the impact of social media on form and questions of identity in contemporary women’s writing. Since leaving Oxford, she has worked as a copyeditor for Tatler and edited manuscripts subsequently published by Edinburgh University Press and Doubleday UK. She has also written for the Financial Times.Three Rooms is her first novel. She lives in London.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer on October 06, 2021

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 invi......more

Goodreads review by Victoria on February 16, 2022

Oof. This little book seemed to last eons, and it took me forever to read. I don’t think I can remember every single reason I disliked it. I was hopeful that this would be good because I loved the way she wrote certain details…at first. And then the whole novel became these elaborate descriptions an......more

Goodreads review by Adam on December 22, 2024

Been waiting for something like this, Patrick Hamilton or Jean Rhys for the Millennial precariat. The boarding room novel updated for the age of couchsurfing and core housing need.......more

Goodreads review by Pe on November 27, 2024

This was my favourite read of 2020, and the best debut I've read in a few years. The prose was faultless. I honestly was blown away by pretty much nearly every page. I really do believe that that the author will be a major literary voice – Literary with a capital L. One of THREE ROOMS key strengths......more

Goodreads review by Siobhan on April 10, 2021

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......more