Fiona Mozley's debut novel which I enjoyed, Elmet, was shortlisted for the 2017 Booker Prize, her latest shifts from the rural setting of Yorkshire to the bustling urban milieu of Soho in London. Whilst these are markedly different places, there are common themes of identity, community, class, wealth, power, gentrification, political activism and inheritance in the two books. Here, we are given the vibrant history of change and the distinct development of Soho, and the contemporary challenges it faces in retaining its diversity, soul and character against the relentlessly powerful, driving forces of capital, the developers and the profiteering that is shaping the London of today. Agatha has inherited a property portfolio from her gangster father, which includes a crumbling Soho house and its tenants. Her father's ex-driver, Roster, is her right hand man, and her ruthless agenda is to evict everyone, a process of displacing and replacing, and turning the house into luxury flats and up market restaurants.

There is a wide cast of disparate but interconnected characters, and we get to learn of their stories, including those wanting to be actors and more privileged graduates. There is a brothel, the sensitively portrayed Nigerian Precious and Tabitha are sex workers by choice, not facing the hazards and dangers of working on the streets. Unlike the desperate and exploitative world of sex trafficking and pimps, with clients like ex-enforcer Robert, they have power and income that they now stand to lose. They decide to fight and campaign against the development, drawing in others into the battle. In the basement cellar are those who exist on the margins of society, like drug addicts, who have lost their real names and are known as, for example, Paul Daniels and Debbie McGee. The narrative takes an unexpected direction into the fantastical, the underworld of the darkest fairytales, in stark contrast with the rest of the novel.

Mozley handles the intricacies and connections of the varied characters with skill, although perhaps there is a weakness in her creation of clearly defined heroes and villains rather than more nuanced individuals. This is a beautifully written book, fun and entertaining, dealing with the issues and challenges that affect our contemporary realities regarding urban development in our capital city, the tensions that simmer and arise with class, property, power and wealth, along with looking at the context of sex and the nature of sexual politics, although I was not a fan of some of the author's writings on sex. Many thanks to John Murray Press for an ARC.

Hot Stew shows us the Soho that I love and miss, teeming with life and excitement. However, it also reveals the darker underbelly; the prostitutes, the vagrants, the illegal immigrant workers. This fast paced novel introduces a host of characters in the first few characters, mostly revolving around a brothel which is under threat from wealthy property developers. Much of the fun is working out how the characters are interrelated as the story unfolds. It reminded me of Jonathan Coe’s No.11, which is high praise indeed.
The principal characters are Precious and Tabitha,a prostitute and her maid. They are fighting for survival as they watch the property developers circling. Their principal foe is Agatha, heir to a large amount of property including the brothel, her moral compass is highly faulty, but is that all her fault? The supporting cast covers all strata of society, some not as well drawn as others but a truly fascinating study regardless.
I really enjoyed this very accomplished novel , my one suggestion is that the author could have lost some of the undeveloped characters, or alternatively a longer novel would have given some of these characters some time to breathe and develop.
Thank you #netgalley #johnmurrays for allowing me to review this ARC

I thought Fiona Mozley’s previous work Elmet was a marvellously dark piece of folk horror and was keen to pick up Hot Stew.
This couldn’t be more different, rarely leaving central London and creating a very different atmosphere, focusing in on sex workers, property developers, homeless, and those that come to soho to drink, dance and enjoy themselves. Whilst there’s a large and disparate character list they feel well sketched - not in unnecessary detail but creating a real sense of life. As storylines inevitably clash together - with a dramatic climax - the conflict between social strata comes increasingly to the fore in a well structured and narratively grimy way.
Very much to be recommended.

Although I found this book a little confusing to start it was worth sticking with. The opening few chapters left me feeling like I wasn’t quite clever enough to follow the stories of the different characters set out in this book but once I had got my head around who was who I could see this book for what it was, a delicious insight into city life. The descriptions in this book are spectacular- both the Soho settings and the clever characters.
Definitely a book that gets you thinking but very enjoyable with it

I struggled with the first half of this book and at one stage actually gave it up. A week later and determined to give it another go I re-commenced reading and found the second half a little easier to read albeit a degree tedious.. I cannot honestly say I enjoyed the book but readily admit it was the work of a skilled wordsmith. Just not for me I am afraid.
My thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for this ARC in exchange for a n honest and unbiased review.

Fiona Mozley’s first novel Elmet was an atmospheric, actually rather haunting work that touched upon issues of land ownership, gentrification and cultural displacement contained within a sometimes almost oppressive family drama. It’s rural setting gave it a focus and a power that made the book reminiscent of the best of Hardy or DH Lawrence.
Hot Stew continues some of the same preoccupations while transposing them to a far more urban setting. The novel is set in a contemporary London Soho and largely centres around the attempts by a rich developer to evict a collective of sex workers from their lucrative, long-established and central property.
The best way to describe Hot Stew is as a State of the Nation novel and perhaps the most ready comparison is to John Lanchester’s Capital. And while I also found that novel rather hit and miss, it still managed to land on more of its targets than this one. Part of the problem is that Lanchester has a pretty decent facility with humour, albeit descending a little too much into broad farce at points, but Mozley, it seems to me, slightly too serious-minded an author to bring that off.
It’s also a question of scope, and perhaps of scale. Lanchester, for example, used the setting of a single London street to provide a focus for the characters and themes he wants to address. Mozley restricts herself to Soho which, while being a relatively confined geographical area, is still large — and diverse — enough that the novel feels a little scattered in places, that its setting is not quite captured in enough depth.
And, of course, evoking Soho is no easy task. There are perhaps only a few other locales in the world that have such a multifarious and colourful history and it was probably not possible to adequately evoke the place’s entire history and atmosphere. I would, for example, have at least liked to have seen a nod towards Soho’s more bohemian past, to the world of the Colony Rooms, of Jeffrey Barnard, Nina Hamnett and Julian Maclaren-Ross. But this is perhaps just a personal complaint and it’s by no means the main focus of the novel. I just would have liked a hint in that direction, that’s all.
Hot Stew does, however, capture modern Soho pretty well and the sense of a colourful, anarchic past being stripped away and erased in the name of the same sort of soulless, big-money development that has imposed a veneer of bland, corporate anonymity on much the rest of central London. It does this via a set of main characters embodying the main players in contemporary society, from developers to lawyers to actors.
I do find some of this characterisation rather slight however. The best drawn characters are probably the sex workers Precious and Tabitha and their occasional client and protector Robert. Others like City worker Bastian and police officer Jackie Rose don’t fare quite so well. The single fact that we’re given about Jackie, for instance — that she is a keen gardener — seems rather on the superfluous side and perhaps even a little on-the-nose given her name. This is a shame as, once again, it was one of the strengths of Elmet and it’s perhaps the case that Mozley is more comfortable working with a smaller cast of characters.
Part of the problem is that the novel is just not big enough. It seems to aspire to a Dickensian spread and also, perhaps, to be a modern White Teeth. But for that to happen, it would need more depth and scope. I’m usually a great champion of shorter novels but this is one occasion where I felt another couple of hundred pages would have given the characters greater room for development and would also have afforded greater opportunity to evoke Soho itself in all its scrappy, rough-diamond glory. There’s definitely the potential here for this to be a much bigger, more expansive novel, perhaps along the lines of a The Corrections of a City On Fire, and more than once I felt as if such designs could be detected within it.
However, for all that, this is still a great read. It’s well written and nicely paced. The ending is a little too apocalyptically convenient but not so much that it can’t be overlooked. The characters might be a little too lightly drawn and the plot a little too familiar but it’s still a good read, if perhaps not quite as hauntingly memorable a one as Elmet.

A few years ago I was really impressed with Fiona Mozley’s intense, atmospheric debut novel Elmet. Hot Stew, her second novel, deals with similar themes of land and its ownership, property and gentrification and it is set in Soho, with a large cast of characters. Among them are sex workers Precious and Tabitha, a retired enforcer, a homeless preacher and a jobbing actor. All are rooted in Soho, some living in a crumbling Georgian townhouse, some frequenting the Aphra Behn local pub. The area is being redeveloped by a ruthless property developer, an heiress in her mid-twenties.

The short chapters follow the individual characters going about their daily lives, sometimes in great detail, bordering on blandness. At the same time, there is a cinematic feel to some of the daily scenes. I found it a novel of contrasts, the black and white view of the world with ruthless developers vs. the downtrodden, where even working for charity is seen as propping up capitalism is somewhat limited. Soho itself was recognisable but oddly, I found it hard to connect to in time and space. While the novel is set in the present, elements of the story felt as if they’d already taken place in real Soho five or even fifteen years ago, it has been gentrified to death but Bar Italia, Maison Bertaux and The French House have seen off many a new brand’s flagship store. I also thought that some of the characters were superfluous to the narrative, diluting it so that it lost some of the intensity present in Mozley’s previous work.

Still, it’s a good book and an engrossing read that many will enjoy. My thanks to John Murray Press and Netgalley for the opportunity to read Hot Stew.

I'm afraid I didn't finish this book. I got 45% of the way through and the plot was just so confusing. There were multiple characters which the story kept flitting between making it hard to follow. Maybe if I had persevered everything would have come together but as I was almost halfway through and I just wasn't enjoying it I gave up!

I was kindly gifted a copy of this book by John Murray Press via Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

When I first started this book I wondered how the characters would all fit together. It flits from one scene to the next with different characters the focus of each short chapter. As the story progresses we come to understand just how intertwined these people’s lives are despite some of them never even meeting.
The drama unfolds around a crumbling building in London, inhabited (and frequented) by a cast of believable and sensitively drawn characters ranging from prostitutes and retired hitmen to drug addicts and fetishists. From here we go on to meet the people who profit from owning buildings such as these, and the problems that can arise when you inherit something other people don’t think you should have.

I found the book to have a lot of heart - none of the depictions of the characters are exploitative and they all develop in to real people with real feelings and emotions. I found myself rooting for Precious as she fought to save her livelihood and that of her fellow sex workers.

The book has a brilliant cast of characters and the way that they all fit together is so cleverly told. Definitely one to watch out for this year.

A wonderful read took me from my pandemic seclusion off to Soho.Full of sophisticated characters of a type a fun wonderful escapist read,#netgalley#johnmurraypress

I loved it. Such a brilliant evocation of Soho, it had me longing to go out to dinner with chic friends and talk into the night. Full of life and incredible warmth. Excellent.

I would much rather not see this as the only traveling I'm going to do this year, but it was a brilliant bit of escapism to make up for all this time inside.

Loved Fiona's work on Elmet and appreciated a good northern perspective on London

Fiona Mozley’s debut novel Elmet surprisingly but deservedly made it to the longlist – and then to the shortlist – of the 2017 Booker Prize. Set in a rural area of Yorkshire, it told the story of a prize fighter living at the edge of legality, who ends up embroiled in a violent tussle (both figurative and literal) between landowners and exploited workers and tenants.

At the time of her Booker success, Mozley was already working on her second novel which, as she stated in an interview at the time, “contains similar themes to Elmet – property, ownership, gentrification. Indeed, one can note close similarities between the subjects of the two works. In Hot Stew, however, Mozley leaves the rural backdrop and moves to London, where a block which houses a long-established brothel is going to be demolished and redeveloped by its owner, Agatha, the millionaire heiress of a Soho “baron”. Sex workers Precious and Tabitha become unlikely champions for themselves and their fellow tenants in a class battle reminiscent of Elmet.

Despite the overlapping themes and the similarities in plot details between Mozley’s two novels, Hot Stew marks a stylistic departure for the author. Where Elmet was taut and punchy, Hot Stew is more expansive. It features a rich cast of characters whose stories, told in parallel segments from their different perspectives, are all ultimately intertwined and linked to the threatened Soho block. This “choral” approach reminded me somewhat of Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other. Mozley adopts a fairly simple, matter-of-fact, sometimes borderline-bland narration, but the novel is still gripping in the way the different storylines interlock like the pieces in a puzzle. Elmet had an almost fable-like feel to it, but in Hot Stew, Mozley largely eschews the mythical in favour of a recognizable urban reality. Not completely though… some passages of the novel delve deep into the earth and past of Soho, presenting a sort of “deep time” perspective alongside the contemporary challenges faced by her cast. There are also some surreal characters (such as the “Archbishop” who leads a group of down-and-outs) and passages which veer on magical realism and/or urban Gothic (such as Debbie McGee’s adventures in the bowels of London and the final apocalyptic denouement).

On a balance, I would say that Hot Stew is less distinctive than Elmet. However, it is undeniably the work of a skilled author and a socially-conscious novel which is also an enjoyable read.

This was such a great read, it was almost like a patchwork quilt with pieces coming together to create a whole. The story is set in Soho and deals with gentrification, inheritance, rich and poor. So many layers - and - so many characters.

The book revolves around a 17th century property in Soho and its inhabitants. There is the cellar/basement where the vagrants congregate. There is the French restaurant which is famous for its snails. Going upward, there are flats and rooms inhabited by prostitutes and immigrants and finally, we get to the roof terrace which has been turned into a roof garden.

This property is owned by Agatha, a billionaire business woman who was the sole beneficiary of her father's will - a shady character who was a bit of a gangster who employed several 'heavies' to enforce his rules. He also liked women. Agatha's mother was a Russian who, since the age of 14, had spent her life searching for wealthy, older men. Agatha was his fifth child and is now being harassed by her siblings who want the will overturned. Agatha wants this property emptied and gentrified and so she is trying to evict all the residents. As a character, she is almost one dimensional - my opinion - she almost seems devoid of emotion and her motivation in this novel is solely to get this building cleared and beautified.

Tabitha and Precious, two prostitutes who live and work in the building and who are, incidentally, the creators of the roof garden, are beautifully drawn. They are not portrayed as victims of their profession - Precious made a conscious decision to become a sex-worker and has made enough money to be able to provide for her two sons. We get the chance to hear their voices as Precious becomes leader in the fight to save the building, to save their way of lives.

There are so many other characters including: Robert, an aged ex-heavy of Agatha's father; his friend Lorenzo who is an actor and who Robert has watched grow from a boy; Roster who used to work for Agatha's father and is now Agatha's chauffeur and man Friday ; the vagrants who have all lost their true names along with their homes - Paul Daniels, Debbie McGee and the Archbishop. Some of these characters are almost Dickensian in the way they are described which I enjoyed. In the beginning, you do feel overwhelmed by the number of characters but each has their own story and eventually you see how they all interconnect.

There is also a sort of magical element to the story - an Underworld. There is the underground cellar where the vagrants hang out, but there is also another underground world with swimming pools and well stocked larders, there are tunnels of different sizes as the Crossrail is being constructed. As for the ending - well, I would describe that as something that happens in apocalyptic novels.

I thoroughly enjoyed this, the variety of characters, the element of magic, the interweaving of everyone's stories. A great read.

Booker Prize winner author Fiona Mozley has returned with her second novel Hot Stew. This novel again is able to illustrate Mosley's supreme talent for creating a vivid sense of atmosphere about wherever she is. In her latest novel it is set inside Soho and draws upon a multitude of different characters, rich and poor within the neighbourhood. Ranging from sex workers to businessmen. People come and go throughout the book, it’s a constant revolving door and we move up and down the Soho townhouse following different characters. All of whom have a distinct story and sense of control, more so than others but each dominate the page in their own unique way. It is hard to want to spend too much time with any of them but luckily Mozley knows when to keep the story moving. It’s a short, punchy novel that is sure to get much attention as Elmet did. This again is very much deserved for a writer worth watching

Very good. Manages to create Soho archetypes which don't fall into cliches..Final scenes ratherr far-fetched but don't take away the enjoyment.

What to say about <i>Hot Stew</i>? It's something of a wild ride - set over a fairly short period of time, and deliberately choppy in style, reflecting a wide range of voices and storylines. This is both strength and weakness: some characters are so little explored you wonder why Mozley bothered to introduce them, but at the same time the broad cacophony of voices is a great stylistic reflection of busy Soho. There is also admirable depth in some of the characterisation, which makes you want more of their stories, particularly those of Tabitha and Precious: colleagues, flatmates, non-romantic life partners, and arguably the protagonists of the novel.

There's a strange flatness to Agatha, the villain of the piece, despite the great lengths that are taken to describe her. This could be deliberate (she is The Gentrifier after all) but it is an odd choice if so.

Narratives around sex work are explored more deftly through Tabitha, Precious, their fellow sex workers, and supporters of their protest against their upcoming eviction. The politics of the novel are clear and confident, and the writing is strongest in these passages, when it's also most humorous. My favourite joke follows Robert revealing that the scar on his forehead is from the removal of a swastika tattoo.

<blockquote>'I'm not ... any more,' says Robert. 'And I never really was, you know, into it. Politically. It was just the people I was mixed up with at the time, when I came down to London. The firms and that.'
Lorenzo nods. 'I once voted Liberal Democrat.'
'Eh?'
'Nothing.'
</blockquote>

Thanks to John Murray Press and NetGalley for the ARC.

Hot Stew is a novel about Soho, gentrification, sex work, and disparities, as Mozley follows up her debut novel Elmet with something similar in some ways and very different in others. It follows a range of characters who are all slightly interconnected, from the women who work in a brothel that takes up part of an old townhouse that the owner wants to tear down to a privileged young man who needs to reevaluate his love life (and whose father is the townhouse owner's lawyer). As a woman goes missing and others start to fight to keep Soho as it was, it seems the area itself is ready to put up a fight.

People who read Elmet might find this one a little different, not only from the central London setting rather than the Yorkshire countryside, but also the range of points of view in the narrative and the writing style. I found Hot Stew easier to get into reading than Elmet, as it felt like it was trying less to be 'literary' and moved quite quickly between different characters. It was clever how the overall story came together through the different characters, though after finishing the novel I'm still not quite sure what some of the plot lines are meant to bring to the overall atmosphere and messages of the novel, which focuses on sex, power, and gentrification. And finally on the 'comparing it with her debut' train, this book and Elmet both have a very black and white morality that paints good versus bad at least in terms of the main conflict.

The latter point I don't necessarily mind, as the novel was about how the old Soho was being lost due to gentrification, and there was a clear message against the wholesale conversion of somewhere with history into something new and expensive. Mozley also covers in passing a range of other issues, mostly with some eventual connection to sex work (there's a very blatant Game of Thrones rip off that tries to say something about the approach the show took towards sex work and sex scenes), and there's some interesting things going on (one of my favourite elements was the relationship between Precious and Tabitha, who both live in the brothel and are more supportive of each other than anyone else in the book), if occasionally they don't seem to go anywhere.

Hot Stew has a great atmosphere and again Mozley writes a location with a real sense of place (and a kind of anticapitalist sense of place at that). I found it readable and the characters engaging, though I didn't quite feel it all came together for me.

Reading this novel's prose was like sinking into a warm bath. I cannot stress how much I enjoyed Mozley's writing in this book. I was barely 30% into it before ordering her previous book as I want to read everything she's ever written now.

The story itself is an ensemble piece set in Soho, London. There are a huge variety of characters from the daughter of a powerful gangster to privileged Cambridge graduates, aspiring actors, sex workers, and more. With such a big cast I was a little intimidated at first, mainly worried I would forget them all but each characters' storyline was complicated and distinct enough for you to have a clear picture of each one with little trouble differentiating them. The interwoven nature of the characters' lives also worked really well as Mozley threaded the characters into each others' plotlines without making it come across like they were shoehorned in. The patchwork effect she accomplishes really makes the whole story work well, creating a picture of London as seen from a number of perspectives.

The themes of the novel focus on class and gentrification. The driving action focuses on the attempted redevelopment of Soho and the eviction of sex workers to make room for it. It approaches the concept of sex work with sensitivity and nuance, mentioning all facets of the issue at hand. It talks about sex trafficking but mainly focuses on how the women at hand are risking losing their independence and income with the loss of the brothel which allows them to work without pimps and the danger of street walking. As the sex workers fight their proposed eviction and develop a movement, it discusses interesting concepts around political activism and appearance as well as confronting the groups that support them for a variety of reasons; paternalistic, patronising or sincere. It approaches the topic with appropriate nuance all without neglecting the characters in the story. They aren't just mouthpieces for buzz words and the topic is used very effectively throughout the novel.

It talks about so many things that I won't go into all of them, from racist casting calls to the mental health of those at the very bottom of the social ladder and how the police treat them. It is a novel that is very concerned with social issues but never at the expense of the plot. Instead, the result is an interesting portrayal of how these different societal issues intersect and play into each other rather than acting like they are independent of each other. Of course, Mozley cannot discuss everything but she packs so much into this book that it would be unfair to criticise her for the things she didn't.

I really loved this book and I highly recommend reading it when it comes out in March 2021. Thank you so much to Netgalley and John Murray Press for an ARC of this ebook!

Hot Stew has been featured in National Book Tokens' 21 books to look out for in 2021 article on Caboodle.