‘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

‘The Lodgers undertakes the vital political work of imagining – and asking its readers to imagine closely imagining – what it actually feels like to live as a body among other bodies, sharing sheets, time and carelessly furnished rooms. The restless tactics of Holly Pester’s extraordinary sentences enact the precarity of the living conditions she describes and reading her novel I have never felt more housed or unhoused, protected or unprotected, more unsettled or more profoundly moved. 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