Three Rooms is a political novel partially set at Oxford University. It’s a heart-breaking story about a lonely young black woman dissociating from the world around her as a result of prejudice and bias. It’s set in 2018 and blends political events such as Brexit, Grenfell, and climate change with the narrator’s personal turmoil at living in a predominantly white privileged environment. Even the house she lives in has a blue plaque outside it, in homage to white Oxford graduate essayist Walter Pater (as of 2016, just four per cent of them featured black people). After she leaves her role as a research assistant, she becomes a temp on a society magazine in London, sleeping on a sofa in a flat, a sub-letting where she is not spoken to with respect. She’s aghast when an intern arrives and fits easily into the snobbish elitist environment. Everyone on the magazine has a connection to fame, wealth, or title, apart from her it seems.

The narrator never truly engages with the people she’s communicating with, never connects or gains any pleasure from it. Interactions are dissatisfactory and disjointed, her inner voice being the complete opposite. Internally, she’s alive with takes on others, political ideas and views, shots she takes with her eyes and wishes of what she could be.

It’s an excellent insight into how it is to be a black person on a predominantly white campus, one that is steeped in privilege and power. It’s a beautifully written novel, one which will keep you up at night and stay with you for days.

Thank you to Jo Hamya, Random House UK, and NetGalley, for this ARC in return for an honest review. Three Rooms is available to pre-order and will be published on 8th July 2021.

Jo Hamya's prose has a Cuskian feel to it, which I absolutely adore, as it is both emotional and contained. The narrator's observations were not as engaging as the storytelling or the writing style, however the exploration of identity and stability in 21st century life as themes are handled delicately and exceptionally well. I will definitely be reading more of the author's work.

I had high expectations for this book, which ticked a lot of boxes for me: politics, a contemporary setting and a bit of Brexit angst.. Set in post EU referendum UK, just after the Grenfell Tower disaster, the main (unnamed) female character, an Oxford graduate, has moved to London seeking work. After securing a zero hours contract job as a copyeditor for a high end glossy magazine, she pays £80 per month to sleep on a sofa in a shared flat.

She spends a lot of her time whining about her precarious finances and being unable to afford to rent an apartment while at the same time is seemingly either in denial or oblivious to her own privilege. She is middle class, went to Oxford but is still very uncomfortable with that privilege. She feels outside a world that she does not understand, failing to comprehend the subtle signals between her (white) office colleagues.

This is a deeply introspective novel and reminded me a lot of Rachel Cusks writing. The reader lives inside the mind of the narrator. At times it was almost too rarefied and highbrow and became more about style than substance. Saying that there are some wonderful lines in the novel such as her description of a hipster as having a "beanie, art school, craft beer pallor" . I did not connect with the main character. Ultimately she was a generic representation of the millennial generation, but I failed to invest in her or care about her.

Many thanks to @netgalley and @vintagebooks for this e-book in return for my honest opinion.

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.

This isn’t the right book for me unfortunately. Lack of speech marks and stream of consciousness is not the right format for me as a reader unfortunately.

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.