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A Novel
by Jo Hamya
From a fiercely talented writer poised to be a new generation's Rachel Cusk or Deborah Levy, a novel set between the London stage and Sicily, about a daughter who turns her novelist father's fall from grace into a play, and a father who increasingly fears his precocious daughter's voice.
August 2020. Sophia, a young playwright, awaits her father's verdict on her new show. A famous author whose novels haven't aged as gracefully into the modern era as he might have hoped, he is completely unaware that the play centers around a vacation the two took years earlier to an island off Sicily, where he dictated to her a new book. Sophia's play has been met with rave reviews, but her father has studiously avoided reading any of them. When the house lights dim however, he understands that his daughter has laid him bare, has used the events of their summer to create an incisive, witty, skewering critique of the attitudes and sexual mores of the men of his generation.
Set through one staging of the play, The Hypocrite seamlessly and scorchingly shifts time and perspective, illuminating an argument between a father and his daughter that, with impeccable nuance, examines the fraught inheritances each generation is left to contend with and the struggle to nurture empathy in a world changing at lightning-speed.
"Gender roles, generation gaps, the nature of genius: Hamya explores big ideas but is at her best offering precise observations…A biting novel of art, inheritance, and evolving mores." —Kirkus Reviews
"Provocative… None of the characters escape Hamya's bemused and excoriating view, nor are there any easy answers to the questions raised about expressions of gender and privilege in art. Fans of Anne Enright's The Wren, the Wren ought to take note." —Publishers Weekly
"A brilliant litmus test of a novel...What Hamya brings to this modern debacle, besides a precision of language and an aptitude for structure that ought to make her contemporaries quake, is a tenderness you don't see coming." —The Atlantic
"Impressive...[The Hypocrite's] pleasures are in the swift, agile way that Ms. Hamya flits between the characters' thoughts and the past and present...This is an intense, onrushing, highly pressurized book, best experienced in a single sitting, like a play." —Wall Street Journal
"Excellent...I enjoyed the novel hugely...Like Edward St Aubyn and Anne Enright, Hamya is so good on generational conflict, the friction of family, and the damage done by charming but complacent men. But The Hypocrite is a strikingly original book too. I tore through it, shoulders clenched but full of admiration." —David Nicholls, author of One Day, in Electric Literature
"The Hypocrite is a sharp book, beautifully written. Jo Hamya poses complex questions—about art and ethics, family life and sexual mores—and withholds from her reader any easy answers." —Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind
This information about The Hypocrite was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jo Hamya is the author of Three Rooms and has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, and the Financial Times, among others. Currently, she is a PhD candidate at King's College London.
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