| Dear Readers,
We are delighted to bring you our first event announcement of 2024.
We’re very excited that Holly Pester will be joining us at Gloucester Road Books to discuss her brilliant debut novel, The Lodgers. The book is one of this year’s most anticipated debuts and we can’t wait to hear from the writer who Kate Briggs, calls "a genius."
The event will take place in the shop, on Wednesday 6th March at 7pm. Tickets and further info are available here.
More on the novel from publisher, Granta
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.
Praise for Holly Pester
‘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
Holly Pester is a poet and writer, whose poetry collection, Comic Timing, was published by Granta. She has worked in sound art and performance, with BBC Radio, Women’s Art Library and Wellcome Collection. The Lodgers is her first novel.
Holly Pester photo credit: Eleanor Vonne Brown |
