Review: Gunk by Saba Sams

Rating: 4 Stars

I read Send Nudes a few years ago when I was getting back into reading and really enjoyed it. This is my second Saba Sams and it was incredibly different - it was such a raw story. Gunk is an exploration of motherhood, friendship and longing for a family, but maybe not in a conventional way."I just think: you want a baby and I've got one. It makes sense." If you enjoy messy characters this one is for you.

Jules, who has been divorced from her ex-husband Leon for five years, still works alongside him at his grimy nightclub, Gunk, in the heart of Brighton. While she spends her nights serving drinks and watching Leon flirt with students, she quietly endures the emotional toll of her situation, pacing home in the early hours of the morning.

The arrival of 19 year old Nim disrupts Jules’s routine. As the two women become closer, Nim reveals that she is pregnant, and Jules agrees to help. Over time, their bond deepens in unexpected ways, leading to a twist that leaves Jules questioning her future.

Despite being a slightly emotional read around human connection, intricate dynamics of friendship, unspoken feelings and infertility, it was still fast paced, and the humor dispersed throughout made it easy and quick to read. It’s not really plot driven, as the opening pages are the ending and focusses on the characters, their flaws and their relationships

Thank you to the publisher for gifting this via netgalley!

Note: It does feature some heavier topics including infertility, drug abuse, parental relationships.

What a tender, raw and emotional story.

Gunk really resonated with me. The perfect read for anyone who has ever woken up at 4am in a strange place and wondered exactly what they are doing with their life.

Nim explodes into Jules life. Jules is still working in Gunk, the grotty Brighton night club owned by her ex-husband Leon. He hires Nim to work the bar and there's an instant connection between the two women. They don't know it yet but an unexpected pregnancy is going to change their lives forever.

"I just think: you want a baby and I've got one. It makes sense."

It seems so simple on the surface. But life is infinitely more complicated and nuanced. I was totally captivated by Nim and Jules story and loved every minute. I loved being witness to Jules and Nims relationship. Their fragility and their complexity. I was hooked from the first page.

The writing is beautiful, gentle and intimate. Sams exquisitely captures pregnancy, birth and parenthood. The longing of wishing for a child. My children are not so little anymore, but this book made those vulnerable days feel like yesterday.

A really moving novel, bittersweet to the end. Very much recommended.

Gunk by Saba Sams is a poignant exploration of love, relationships, and the complexities of family. Jules, who has been divorced from her ex-husband Leon for five years, still works alongside him at his grimy nightclub, Gunk, in the heart of Brighton. While she spends her nights serving drinks and watching Leon flirt with students, she quietly endures the emotional toll of her situation, pacing home in the early hours of the morning.

The arrival of nineteen-year-old Nim, with her shaved head, mysterious distance, and quiet sweetness, disrupts Jules’s routine. As the two women become closer, Nim reveals that she is pregnant, and Jules agrees to help. Over time, their bond deepens in unexpected ways, leading to a surprising twist. When Nim gives birth to a baby and disappears, leaving Jules to care for the newborn, Jules is left with a future full of uncertainty, grappling with the unanswered questions about Nim’s whereabouts and what lies ahead for her and the child.

Gunk is a deeply emotional story about the fragility of relationships and the intricate dynamics of friendship. The narrative beautifully portrays Jules’s journey of longing for a family while coming to terms with the stark reality of infertility. The novel captures the rawness of human connections, the quiet ache of unspoken feelings, and the bond between two women who, despite their differences, share something profound.

This book is a bittersweet reflection on the choices we make, the lives we create, and the people we let into our hearts. It’s a moving, heartfelt exploration of what it means to find family in the most unexpected of places.

Read more at The Secret Book Review.

This, for me, was very different to SEND NUDES but of course has Sams's signature wit and ability to describe the grotesque and taboo in such a delicious way. This had me holding out for just one more page all through, proving her right to the many accolades she has received! Will recommend!

I really enjoyed this. Would I have liked it as much if I hadn't just had a kid? IDK. But I liked how short it was, and the fast pace, and the focus on characters and relationships. My one critique is I thought the ending was a bit deus ex machina and a bit too quickly resolved. But overall a really good book - very impressive. She really does have a way with words and language - lots of great similes in this, and the setting (Brighton) is evoked very well.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.

<i>It was not possible, I realised then, to build a new destiny through your child. If you had any control over them at all, which seemed doubtful to me now, it was only in the very early days. After that, you had no choice but to do what you could with the person you were given, and with the person you were yourself. Simply, you had to allow life to happen.

Her head was satisfying to touch, like the neck of a horse.

We could have been in Paris, if it weren't for all the Tesco's.</i>
</i>

This is a little more conventional than I expected from Sams. Though it's set in grotty flats and a seedy club, at heart it's another motherhood book, even if it rattles the contours of that narrative. We even get a summary soundbite: 'we've been caught up in trying to define what we have. I tried to limit her to employee, to housemate, to surrogate. In turn, her approach was expansion; she reached up for romantic love. I see that we've been trapped by language, by legitimacy. But there is no need.'

A bit too much baby stuff for my personal taste.

I must confess I spent the first third of Gunk thinking it was probably not the right book for me. I was wrong. It got under my skin and really made me care, for Jules and for Nim.
It is set in Brighton. This is always a winner for me, as I lived there for 14 years and love it. The descriptions of the seedy student nightclub were excellent and very familiar.
Mostly, it was a story of unlikely friendship, the impact of trauma, and the power of love.
A quick and easy read, that will challenge you and grab your heart.
I definitely recommend it.

Jules works in a bar called Gunk that is owned by her ex husband.
When a nineteen year old girl Nim comes to work there, they become friends.
Jules has been trying for a baby for years and found out that she is infertile.
When Nim becomes pregnant she tells Jules that she will give her the baby after it’s born.
A sad story about relationships and friendships.
Thank you to NetGalley and Bloomsbury Publishing Plc for my e-copy in exchange for an honest review.

In 2023 I reviewed Saba Sams’s short story collection “Send Nudes” and remarked that if there is a a hottest property in the world of short story literary writing then it must be Saba Sams: then just 27 but already winner of the prestigious 2022 Edgehill Prize for short stories with the collection, winner of the equally prestigious 2022 BBC National Short Story Award with one of the collection “Blue 4eva” and (which is what drew me to her work) included in the famous decennial Granta Best of Young British Novelists list (2023 edition) for her writing on her work-in-progress debut novel.

And this is that novel – interestingly with the same title, eponymous setting (a deliberately grotty Brighton student nightclub) and same husband of the narrator (a rather shifty serial-cheating Leon) as the short story included in the special Granta edition, but with a number of other changes (including the narrator’s name).

The book opens with Jules alone in her Brighton flat looking after a one day old baby whose birth mother Nim (Julies being noted as her partner and so present for the birth) unexpectedly fled the hospital after giving birth – and most of the rest of the book gives the back story to these events.

Jules is in her early thirties. Jules grew up in the suburbs as an only child with very over-protective parents and convinced she was rebelling against them she started dating and quickly married Leon – the charismatic but troubled owner of Gunk. Now she has been divorced from him for around five years, with Leon addicted both to substances and to women – particularly casual hook ups with female students, like Jules seduced by his charismatic air of danger/rebellion), but she still works as a manager and bartender in the nightclub.

And that is how she meets 19 year old Nim – shaved head and confident (very different from the typical student Leon tries to seduce) who starts work at the bar – the two growing close: from Jules point of view more of an attraction to character and a desire to care for someone she perceives as needing mothering (for all Jules attempts to escaper her parents protection and control she exhibits the same behaviour with others – as a child only ever playing with younger children she could pretend to mother); for Nim more of a conventional sexual attraction (although Jules is blind to this).

I pause to comment here that these dynamics – someone replicating the very behaviour they resented in their parents, someone blind to the rather glaring signs that a friend wants instead to have a relationship – while common/realistic were I felt disappointingly standard/conventional literary fare from an author where I expected more original takes.

Jules seems unable to have children, but when Nim has a one night stand with Leon in an attempt to get Jules jealous she immediately falls pregnant – but then proposes that she effectively acts as a surrogate for Jules – the exact arrangements (and what happens post birth – the two living together pre-birth) has still not been quite resolved when Nim goes into premature labour.

Sam’s short stories (at least those that I have read) are largely made distinctive by their narrators (or third party PoV protagonists) - typically young women (sometimes children), and by their topic - the navigation of the 21st Century world of fractured and complex family dynamics and the pressures of social media but with often the girl or woman gaining agency as the story progresses.

About her (then work in progress) novel Sams wrote “for a long time my protagonist was a young woman. I felt like I knew how to do that; it had worked in Send Nudes, and I guess I was afraid to stray away from something that I knew I could do ……… But recently I've flipped the perspective in the story and started speaking from an older character. It's been really freeing. I like considering the ways that previous relationships, jobs and experiences have influenced a person. With an older character, there's so much more backstory to play with."

But as I have already commented this seems to blunt what is most distinctive about her short story writing – with the influences of the backstory a little too obvious. And at the same time the novel reads much more like an extended short story so does not really make use of the longer form.

So, while this was an enjoyable and quick read it was not as challenging or distinctive as I would have liked – but the author remains one to follow closely.

Is the holding proof cover supposed to be reminiscent of brat or is this just the brain rot setting in? Either way, Saba Sams is such an It Girl writer that it feels right. Her short story collection Send Nudes was such a standout and I think there's a lot of people waiting with baited breath for her first novel.

I'll admit I requested a digital copy of Gunk, which comes out in May from Bloomsbury on the back of that story collection without reading the blurb, but in a way the plot felt immaterial to me, Sams is just that good a writer.

The book is about Jules, who works in a student nightclub in Brighton owned by her dirtbag ex husband Leon. You get the feeling Jules is just killing times disappointed time and again by her ex, as well as generally with how life turned out. She never knew what she wanted, she just knew it Was Not This.

She is immediately drawn to Nim, a younger woman with a troubled past who starts working in the club, an instant connection that is only interrupted briefly by Nim sleeping with Leon. When months later Nim disappears leaving Jules holding a baby she never wanted, but Jules had craved, Jules is at sea after things finally seemed to make sense.

It seems like I've spoiled the novel here but really it is just the beginning, and in a way the plot isn't all that important. It's a book about forged connections and found family, about belonging and how it doesn't always come about in the way you expect. It's a book about how a bad situation, relationship, job or actually, a bad lot in life so far, doesn't define your future, and how something wonderful could come out of something messy.

In all, not my favourite, but there's something so pleasing about reading Sams that I still enjoyed it and want to recommend it to people, as I'm sure when it comes out it will find readers who love it.

Pros: the blurried lines, complicated and complex issues and relationships.
I could not get fully immersed in the main character’s narration.

"For Nim and me, there is no word either, no neat category. We’re more than friends, less than lovers. We’re intimate but not sexual. I’m old enough to be her young mother, young enough to be her older girlfriend. We’ve slept with the same man, worked the same job. We lived as housemates but we shared a bed. Now, she’s had a baby but the baby is mine. It occurs to me that perhaps this has been the problem, for Nim and me. We’ve been caught up in trying to define what we have. I tried to limit her to employee, to housemate, to surrogate. In turn, her approach was expansion; she reached up for romantic love. I see that we’ve been trapped by language, by legitimacy."

Saba Sams story Blue 4eva won the 2022 BBC National Short Story Award, the judges citing its "transportive atmosphere, its masterful telling of complex family dynamics and the sense of building tension", and the collection in which it was included, Send Nudes, won the 2022 Edge Hill Prize.

But it was on the strength of this, at that time forthcoming, novel, that, in 2023, she was included on Granta’s decennial Best of Young British Novelists.

Gunk is a well-crafted story of another unconventional set-up. The novel opens with our narrator Jules, in her flat, caring for a 1-day old baby, but which is not hers:

"I’m not the baby’s mother, and this is why he cries. He has no language to tell me that I’m not right for him, and yet he tells me with his body, with his eyes. I was naïve to think that, if I scooped him straight from the womb and held him immediately to my bare chest, so in his first breaths he would inhale only my smell, he would mistake me as his. I was wrong to think that, if I brought him home, all of time would be erased. In reality, the flat was just as we’d left it: the bath full with cool, blue water; Nim’s clothes a twisted loop on the floor; the ice cube tray upside down in the sink."

Much of the novel then explains how this came about - I will avoid spoilers, although the plot is less the point than the relationships between Jules and the other characters. Nim, the baby's mother, neatly skewers Jules's perceive self-sufficiency as well as what perhaps attracts her to others with perceived needs:

"You worry about me, you worry about Leon. You don’t think anyone can stand on their own two feet, except yourself. Imagine if I dared to worry about you, Jules. You’d be so offended you’d never speak to me again.
[...]
Nim swam for fifteen minutes, maybe more. I sifted pebbles through my hands and thought about how she was right: I was determined to think of myself as above other people. Was this why I wanted a baby? Was this why other people kept on having babies? Despite the strain of pregnancy, the agony of birth, despite the terror of unknowable love, we wanted so badly to see ourselves in somebody else, and we wanted to have control over that person. We wanted a chance to build a destiny, from day one."

A quick and immersive read, although perhaps a little conventional for my taste and expectations after the Granta listing, and lacking the tension of Blue4Eva - I wonder if the short-form is the author's strong suit.

Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC.

Saba Sams debut novel ‘Gunk’ deals with motherhood, queer relationships and found family. It is short and readable but ultimately I found it a bit lacking in anything particularly boundary-pushing or innovative, with both the prose and plot falling a little flat for me. Told from the perspective of a very passive narrator, Jules, the novel as a whole feels noticeably humourless - at its best when exploring the character of Nim, who is considerably more interesting than Jules but who is given a lot less focus.

Sadly this didn’t work for me, but I still plan to check out Saba Sams previous short story collection.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the e-ARC.

Gunk by Saba Sams explores how certain relationships can't really be defined because they're complicated and what that means for each of the two women in the book.

A beautiful book about the complexities of love, family and choosing the life you want for yourself. Jules was a little bland for the main character, but Nim was exciting to read about. She was an enigma, floating in and out of people’s lives and existing solely for herself. I really enjoyed the simple writing and focus on the found family element of the story.