The Lodgers

by Holly Pester

'What it said to me was that I was here again, I was back, back from the great nowhere of somewhere else, returned, all too officially, to the whereabouts of Moffa.'

After a year away, a woman arrives back in her hometown to keep an eye on her wayward mother, Moffa. Living in a precarious sub-let, she is always on edge, anticipating a visit from the landlord or the arrival of the other resident. But her thoughts also drift back to the rented room she has just left, now occupied by a new lodger she has never met, but whose imagined navigations within the house and home become her fascination.

The minor dramas of temporary living are prised open and ransacked in Holly Pester's irreverent reckoning with those who house us. This is a story about what it means to live and love within and outside of family structures. It is also a stunning first novel from a writer already hailed as one of the best poets of her generation.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Novels

226 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 1, 2024

Reviews

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

She must be a little like me, she made the same decisions based on the same limited options, and now she's there. I like to imagine how she is feeling and compare it to how I felt. I like to compare. How else can we do this? I wouldn't get out of the bath if I couldn't imagine other people doing it. I wouldn't do anything. My life is a triangle of where I am, have been and want to be; of what I crave, don't have and cant have; of who I miss, hate . . . forget. In the new flat I was tired and un-unpacked. I sat down, still in my coat, on the cola-stained sofa, got comfy, hated it, and set to work imagining you.

A fascinating novel, which focuses on the precarity and lack of agency in modern life for those not even able to aspire to be part of generation rent, told both from the narrator's perspective, in an unofficial sublet, and what she imagines as the life of the person who succeeded her in temporary lodgings with a single mother. Mother-daughter relationships are also examined from the perspective of the single mother and a young child, but also the odd relationship the narrator has with her own mother, who she refers to as Moffa

The style is rather distinctive and from comments made by the author the style and tone, simulteneously deadpan and surreal, is influenced in equal parts by experimental feminist writing (Muriel Spark, Ann Quin, Ferrante, Hilda Hilst) and by comedy - early Reeves and Mortimer, and for the origin of the Moffa character a decade ago, Pete and Dud.

And she neatly skewers provincial England: The unfortunate characteristic of all regional towns is that they are very definitely in Britain. You can forget this country exists in cities. Concepts like England are less relevant; all cities belong to each other worldwide. Where are you when in a city? Nowhere and everywhere. Buzzing on a unique time zone. But towns? They’re in the country, they’re part of it, they are it. Little nation devices.

[Anna Wood · Rating 2 out of 5]

There were a few interesting parts but at the end of the day I’m just confused and felt like I’ve just read a rambling woman’s endless train of thought

[Alex George · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this. Love it when poets write novels.

This is a book about rented accommodation, its quirks, its little moments of joy and terror, its otherliness, its inbetweeness, its inherent gothicism, the impossibility of homeliness In This Economy.

Basically there are two narrative strands. In one we follow around this nameless protagonist who's just moved back to her deadbeat hometown, into a sublet round the corner from her estranged mother's house. In the other we follow the iMAGINED character, dreamed up by the protagonist when she is bored, of a woman who has replaced her at her previous tenancy, lodging with a single mother and her feral daughter. Does that make sense? It does in the book lol.

The specificity of Pester's language is so strong it makes the whole atmosphere so eerie and strange but also so much fun! It really lends itself to being read in tiny chunks, with all these little vignettes rustling about like a bag of crisps.

What kept sketching me out was how engrossing the lodger's narrative was and how invested I got in her world and her disasters, before jumping back and being like 'this isn't real! This is all made up! I am being toyed with!' Fascinating to see how the two characters mulch together and disappear. Truly it is impossible to be a full person under someone else's roof.

Charming. Silly. Sad. Full of triangles.

Would recommend to fans of words!

[Paulina · Rating 3 out of 5]

an ok read. i think i'm a bit too dumb to get all the hidden meanings and the symbolism but i guess this would be fun to analyze in a university literature class

[Tina · Rating 4 out of 5]

THE LODGERS by Holly Pester is a great debut novel! I found this writing to be weird and surreal and enticing. It’s about a woman who returns to her English hometown to live in a sublet and reminisces about her last rental. The writing was very interesting that would switch between first person in present day and second person to the new occupant in her last lodging. I really enjoyed the touches of humour and the interiority of the narrator. Pester is a poet and I loved the poetic sensibility to the writing in this novel.

Thank you to Assembly Press for my gifted review copy!

[Benedict Ness 📚 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Captures the profound in the mundane everyday ness of life

The awkwardness of human relationships

Beautiful poetic prose

The changing perspectives kept the book very well paced

Tells us a lot about how the spaces we inhabit shape us, and how we shape them.

[Eloise · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved the writing, the sharpness of insight and how it conveyed the discomfort of living with strangers and not being able to relax, ever - I could feel the tension and awkwardness leaving my body as I put the book down. However, I found the alternating chapters distracting at times and without much investment in the main character I came away not really sure what I wanted for her.

On another note, I will definitely be trying lemonade with pickled onions.

[Emily Wight · Rating 4 out of 5]

Experimental and fun book that was a joy to read. Some great clever language and turns of phrase - you can tell a poet wrote this. I’m unsure of how the different stories linked up or of a few elements of the plot but it didn’t really matter, I still enjoyed it and let it seep over me. Read it in a day.

[Ellie · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a complicated book to explain.
The novel starts with a woman moving into a short-term, generic sublet apartment with a noticeably absent flatmate. She is also alternately talking to “you” who is in a seemingly parallel situation, currently moving into a temporary room in the house of a single mother and her young child. She vividly describes the first day and life with the woman and her daughter, indicating it is perhaps a situation she has been in herself. In the main narrative, the woman has just returned to the town she left in her teens, where Moffa, her narcissistic mother, still lives. She does this frequently, opting for different rentals each time. The narrator is planning to visit her mother but is anxious. When she does attempt to visit her, Moffa is never at home. There are layers of complexity to their relationship, which led the narrator to leave home at 16 and begin a nomadic existence. The ending is open, but I found it hard to understand as things happen, but it is all very vague and confusing.

The narrator, employing a first-person, stream-of-consciousness style, explores her feelings of alienation juxtaposed with the enchantment she observes in the mother-daughter bond of the second “you” narrative, a relationship she struggles to relate to due to her own un-nurtured childhood.
We follow the narrator's interactions and the relationships she forms along the way, which tend to end up leaving her feeling unwanted. For instance, a notable aspect of her stay is the anticipation and anxiety over meeting the elusive flatmate who is never present, adding to the narrative's sense of mystery and unfulfilled connection.
Despite the vivid descriptions and flashbacks, the plot remains elusive and meandering, focusing more on the protagonist's inner experiences and reflections.

This book overall, left me with a sense of sadness after following this character, who has little choice but to find herself in places where people don’t want her.
I'm not sure I entirely understood the plot, but I clearly Understood the themes of belonging, childhood and alienation.


Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for an ARC of this book for my honest review.

[Alicia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one landed at about a 3.25, so I rounded up. The language was lovely, and I wasn't surprised that the author is also a poet. I have read a few books about how people interact with their home/lodging and this was an interesting take on that theme. This kind of petered out at the end, leaving me vaguely unsatisfied.

[Lulufrances · Rating 4 out of 5]

Weirdly sad, maybe because lodgers always seem so eerily rootless and unsettled in a way. Not able to create their own little cozy nests.
I really liked reading this, especially as I‘m currently also somewhat of an interim-lodger, so I felt certain sentiments more than I would at other times.

The way this felt so English to me reminded me of the book „An Experiment in Leisure“ by Anna Glendenning, kind of the same vibe.

[angie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This story left me unsettled and a little sad. Between the lines of the author's wonderful, prose-like style, the true story of the protagonist's early life, the influence that has on her actions and how she lives her life, are revealed.

[George Russell-Stracey · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this. You can tell the author is a poet. Surreal and fiercely imaginative. Lots of fun and an interesting take on how it feels to be part of the renting population. Also, I judged this book hard by its cover and it didn’t fail to deliver.

[Georgia Hodge · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5⭐️

[Helena · Rating 4 out of 5]

Smart and original concept, compelling writing style, felt like I was left slightly short at the end but that might've been the point

[Mali · Rating 4 out of 5]

very weird - need to digest this in book club before I review I think

[Stephen Dilley · Rating 4 out of 5]

'The Lodgers' offers a thought-provoking exploration of the pressures and exigencies of living in shared and temporary accommodation. The unnamed narrator describes moving into a sublet flat in the small town where she grew up so that she can be close to her mother ('Moffa'). At the same time, the narrator imagines 'you' moving into the home in another town where she had previously been a lodger, living alongside a single mother and her young daughter. The novel alternates between these two strands of the 'I' in one town and the 'you' in the other.

I really admired the precision and insight with which Holly Pester unpicks the deeply transactional nature of modern living for so many people, in which every aspect of our life can be commodified. The 'you' figure is required to absent her bedroom during daytime hours as it is transformed into her landlady's beauty parlour, and the narrator reflects on the very specific kitchen and bathroom privileges that are included in the £27 per night she pays, and the sacrifices this entails for both landlady and lodger, observing that 'How we cater for and clean ourselves will be convenient for another person we live with, or not.' To lodge, according to the narrator is, 'to adapt and hide my needs rather than dig down, simply hover without much substance, meekly occupy, as the tenant of the tenant.'

We also come away from this book with a powerful sense of what it means to be someone else's side-hustle: at one point, 'you' describes themselves as 'a minor yet neutral source of income'. The narrator also looks back on renting out a previous apartment from an acquaintance on the condition that she would 'leave occasionally and erase all evidence of yourself when Beverly needed to stay there for work.' These interactions invariably cheapen and dehumanise both parties.

This is in many ways a strange and unsettling read, with many parts of the story remaining unknown and mysterious, such as the narrator's supposed flatmate Kav and her relationship with Moffa. But at its heart it engages profoundly with the fundamental issue of housing and what it means to occupy space in today's world. It reminded me of recent novels such as Jo Hamya's 'Three Rooms' which also grapple with these questions but by focusing specifically on lodging, Pester finds a new and important angle on this topic. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC to review.

[Lindsay Hunter · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was so bizarre and poignant. “And if you had felt worry even before your brain could understand what that feeling was, and instead coded worry right into your sense of place, then you wouldn’t leave either, because the feeling never leaves you.” Incredible. I laughed a lot and gasped too.

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Lodgers was a lot more offbeat that I was expecting - but I mean that as a compliment!

It follows a woman who is navigating a new house share and envisioning who is living in the room she recently vacated. I haven't read any books with this a story-focus before, so loved the fresh feel of reading a book that feels so new in terms of theme.

As someone who has lived in many house shares in my time, this was a subject that I found relatable. And the slight absurdity and projection of the story, along with the way it is written, actually does capture the unsettling sense that accompanies these shared-house situations. A unique read that pops into my mind regularly since reading.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is what I do. I visit cities and think I live there. I walk around them fascinated with a bag over my shoulder, believing I am unstuck from the permanent returning to what has felt since childhood like an eternal armpit. I take myself out to a famous square, wander around a museum on a lunch break needing to go to the toilet or to take a photo, I get a job, I try something, then come to my senses as it all fails and head off, fold the beginning of a life up and shoo myself into transit. Not unstuck, stuck still. The long streets of cities, the institutions, the people were exciting but I needed to get back in order to become again the one who returns, because that’s who I am. Every time I return I have to explain to myself that where she lives was always my destination. Each life I had before was just a short story to put inside me, every new start a failure, and each temporary address was one head on top of a beast of multiple heads. Is this making sense? I collected theories of how to be employed or person-like, how to believe in locks and keys, to be part of the nucleus inside that stalks the circumference, with love, the combination of sauntering while remembering to quit leaving, and then returned from there to this small town where Moffa lived.

An impressive debut novel from a writer (and academic) previously prize-shortlisted for her debut poetry collection “Comic Timing”.

It is told over 54 short chapters which alternate between two different storylines:

A first person account where each chapter is titled “Moffa the [noun]” (town, house, rain, sounds, leaving, walls, bathroom, view etc);

A second person account where each chapter is titled “You [verb]” (arrive, are embarrassed, play with Milly, laugh at toys, hear words etc).

In the first set our unnamed female narrator has moved back to the town where her mother (think of Moffa as a personalised rendering of mother in what is a far from traditional mother-daughter relationship) lives. When the narrator was a child and teenager Moffa, who worked somewhat itinerantly as a TV and stage actress, had a series of lodgers staying in their house. Now the narrator has taken a sub-let in her home town – one with a small view of her childhood home. The sub-let is probably against the tenancy of the absent male who sub-lets the flat: he for example asking her to pay rental with a “birthday money” or similar reference and not to interact with the neighbours).

Moffa is nowhere to be seen – even when the narrator gets around to going to her house; equally mysteriously absent is Kav (whose named is marked with a post-it note on the other bedroom of the flat) – but the narrator finds herself reluctantly drawn into the life of the town, including a pub-quiz about which one of Moffa’s old friends is obsessed.

September in a town in this country. Bad luck. A wrong ache of a country. An angry old nation sitting in an armchair swatting at nothing. I too was part of its corduroy, so was this town and this café. Let’s line up and collect the biscuit crumbs. After a drizzly walk I entered my building and stomped up the stairs, considering all the tragedies of a pub quiz.

Later …………

The unfortunate characteristic of all regional towns is that they are very definitely in Britain. You can forget this country exists in cities. Concepts like England are less relevant; all cities belong to each other worldwide. Where are you when in a city? Nowhere and everywhere. Buzzing on a unique time zone. But towns? They’re in the country, they’re part of it, they are it. Little nation devices. All towns are model towns. Half the population of a town likes it like that, they’d crawl even more into the tenets and tents of Great Britain if they could. Others are so stunned by the impoverishing effects of their own town on them that they don’t think about it, can’t think about it. Their counterparts are either shame-dumb or gut-dumb from the richness of the town’s resources they hoard.

Before her (temporary) move back to her home town the narrator took (exactly one year previously) studied in a different town for a rather alternative course (taking “elements from all these theories [triangulation in the workplace … triangulation in geometry … triangulation in data science] – adding some Buddhist principles of the three bodies, bits of acupuncture and some dance”) while lodging with a mother and young daughter family. There she stays in a single bedroom which she has to vacate during the day while the mother works as a beautician.

And what gives the book its real distinctiveness is that the second set of chapters – are addressed to someone that the narrator imagines replaces her in the house, doing the same course and encountering many of the same things (including becoming something of an additional family member drawn in by the irrepressible young daughter – and encountering a visiting professor who stays from time to time in a garage conversion and who the “you” – at least – starts sleeping with). The sections therefore feel like a way for the narrator to examine her feelings and experiences at a distance.

I know precisely the arrangements that led you down the street you are walking along. To the house you are approaching. They were the same as mine, I went there. I was like you. And so you might have a feeling you know me too. You’re feeling it now as you walk with the edge of your body facing its plan. Maybe you also have a way of trying to return to an idea of homeliness that hurts and heals, and involves a lot of train travel. Maybe you also shift debt around and email strangers, and move through life trying to be in the right place but keep ending up in slightly the wrong place. You’re looking for something – no, actually, you’re hoping that some glorious alternative is looking for you. You’ve been making yourself available to it in all sorts of places and people until today, when you will plant your readiness in someone else’s house.

Recommended for anyone looking for a book which is both distinctive (if not even quirky) in its style and yet impactful in its subject matter – effectively the transactional economics of the UK’s housing crisis and how the impermanency it engenders impacts lives (particularly those of young women).

The economy of you entering that house for the first time, as I once did, is as specific as baking: the transactions, the equivalents, the values that are substance, the values that are pressure, the timing and the work and the promises, the heat, the shape, the terms.

My thanks to Granta for an ARC via NetGalley

[Dave Appleby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Homelessness does not necessarily mean living on the streets.

This novel about transience has two alternating narrations. In one the narrator describes, in the first person, her present life, using the past tense. The other narrative, written in the second person, is an imaginary reconstruction of the life of the person who replaced her in her previous lodging. This 'reconstruction' is clearly based on her own experiences in that house so it refers to the past while being written in the present tense.

In the present life, she is living in a sublet, forever awaiting the arrival of a flatmate. Her flat overlooks her mother's house; she goes round from time to time (she has a back door key) but her mother (called 'Moffa') isn't there. Moffa used to be an actress and was notorious in the neighbourhood for her parties; the narrator recalls being on tour as a child with her mother with all the transience that life entailed; her childhood seems to be mostly one of loneliness and observing others. Even now she is clumsy and socially awkward.

In the past life she lives in a town nearer the coast, where she studies a therapy course based on triangles. She rents a room (weekday evenings and nights only, since it was used as a workroom during the day; she has to make alternative arrangements for weekends) from a woman who lives with her daughter, a badly-behaved little girl. A professor also lodges there and they have occasional casual sex; more transience.

The novel is very good at conveying how much of an outsider a lodger is

“How we cater for and clean ourselves will be convenient for another person we live with, or not.” (p 29)
“What else are we except things for whoever we live with to put up with?” (p 29)
"I learned, like you, to lodge, I mean, adapt and hide my needs rather than dig down, simply hover without much substance, meekly occupy, as the tenant of the tenant, it's how I was born.” (p 85)
The narrator is eternally trying to 'triangulate'. At the 50% turning point, she gives several meanings for this word, from psychology, geometry, and data science. She and the professor form a triangle with the child. In geometry, triangulation is a technique of establishing where something is in reference to two other points; perhaps the narrator is trying to work out where she is psychologically in reference to Moffa's house and the house in which she previously lodged. Triangulation in data science is something similar: it examines findings from different viewpoints in order to test a hypothesis; "it's a process of rigour and caring about truth" (p108). This is exactly what the narrator's competing narratives are doing.

In map-making, triangulation involves using two fixed points in order to locate a third point. But it only works if you have those fixed points. The narrator grew up with the unstable Moffa, and an apparently absent father (who is referred to only thus: “The house is all mother, carpets and bed linen, while the domain, the father, is the reason we can't look in mirrors at night.”; p 44). She has no fixed home. She is fundamentally lost.

This sense of dislocation and rootlessness is repeated time and again:

“I had journeyed; had been myself in transit.” (p 3)
“Maybe you also shift it around and email strangers, and move through life trying to be in the right place but keep ending up in slightly the wrong place.” (p 10)
“I was always spinning around on the hoof of having-just-left and on the hoof of having-just-got-back.” (p 44)
She also conveys, I think, this sense in the words she uses and the sentences she constructs. What she is saying is all about utterly mundane reality, but the way she puts it can verge on the psychedelic. For example: “Having to be impermanent but ready - like an imminent alarm clock, encountering street names and weather, sacrificing one plan and one direction in favour of another, regarding a nice tree, dead tree, common threat, bad design, couples walking together, sunrise, nature in reality against my idea of it - is a socially inherited condition. What I mean is: that same morning I woke up very early and went for a walk in a nearby woods.” (p 148) Lists like this one occur sporadically throughout the book; their apparent grammatical and semantic incoherence jars and disturbs. At least this sentence is followed by its explanation. Others, such as “A child is a moving bloom of orphaned licence. Her world is made of unstoppable radial prompts.” (p 124), or “Something fundamental about men struck me in that instant: they are the inevitable figures of conclusions.” (p 204 - 205), I was unable to translate.

Inevitably, there is little in the way of plot, since a plot implies a purpose. Tenancies do, however, have a beginning and an end and so the narrative does have a shape. This hidden structure uses glimpses of the everyday life of these lodgers to build up a mosaic portrait of the narrator. Not everything is explained, the reader has to fill in a lot of gaps, but in the end one gets a sense of the character.

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“You have arrived somewhere, but not quite. You will be back later, moving into the slipstream. Soon you won’t want to leave at all.” I’m a big fan of poets writing sharp and stylish novels that fuck around with the form without ever veering too far into self-indulgence or weirdness for its own sake, and Holly Pester’s The Lodgers does exactly this, and it does it so, so well. I loved her poetry collection Comic Timing so had serious expectations for her debut novel, and they were met in spades. Pester’s protagonist is a woman returning to her hometown, subletting a room across from her mother’s house, thinking back to the home she’s just left behind, imagining the life of the new lodger who by now she thinks will have moved into her old home. Half the novel sees the protagonist moving around places in her hometown, while the other half supposes a life from nothing, or rather from the narrator’s subconscious. Amongst this back-and-forth is a general contemplation about what it means / takes to be at home, especially in an economy that fosters instability and companionship as a necessity. (As such, I found it to be particularly rewarding to read a couple of days after moving into my new flat, sharing for the first time.) The writing itself is so elastic and playful, but never fails to land its more thoughtful, even axiomatic points. “What else are we except things for whoever we live with to put up with?” “In life we briefly get to say the truth ourselves. The rest is admin and apologising.” Its shifting between the first / second person feeds into a general lack of fixity in the novel — in characters and places and the past — all pointing to a certain kind of precariousness, key to the novel’s politics.

[Chris Whybrow]

I don't have much to say about this book. Mostly because it's very short, and very little happens. 'The Lodgers' is a look into the lives of two characters, our unnamed narrator, recently moved into a new room and waiting for her flatmate to arrive, and the woman who has moved into the narrator's old room in a single mother's house. Except that the woman in the old room is just the narrator imagining the woman who has moved into the old room, and I got the impression she was mostly going off her own experience there, so really it's just two slices of life from one character.

I was a lodger myself for a few months after leaving home. It's awkward, being a stranger in a family's house. It's awkward in a way that living in a shared house isn't, and having moved into a shared house since then I know which experience I prefer. The way the experience is portrayed here certainly feels authentic, for the most part, and it's certainly well written. That said, very little happens. I think the book might have worked better as a collection of poems. At times it seems like that's what it wanted to be anyway.

I have to say, this joins a surprisingly long list where a younger female character gets into a sexual relationship with an older man that she doesn't find attractive for no clear reason why. I hate this trope. I hate seeing it everywhere. Is it supposed to be a metaphor for self loathing? I don't think many of the women I know in real life do this. Granted, it would be very rude of me to ask then, but it's not the impression I get. I've certainly never got into relationships like that with any of the people I've lived with myself.

You can probably read this in an afternoon. Whether or not you want to is a decision I will leave you to make by yourself.

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an interesting book because it dealt with issues that I have not seen in many books before. How we live and what modern housing solutions mean for our everyday experience were, for me at least, the focal points - closely followed by the protagonists' relationship with their mother and the place they come from.

In a way, these two themes come together in the structure of the book: Some chapters are told in the first person. A woman has returned to her hometown and is preparing to meet Moffa, her mother, with whom she has a turbulent history. At the same time, she is known in this place, but never really gets into contact with the old world trying to suck her back in. She instead lives in an uncomfortable sublet situation with a roommate who never shows up, waiting.

Other chapters are told in the second person, addressed to an imaginary woman who moves into the house where the narrator used to live with a mother and child. She imagines this other person doing what she did, feeling what she felt - and why she might feel or act differently. Here, she examines her own mixed feelings on motherhood, family and belonging.

These two narrative levels exist side by side and overlap. The Lodgers had a cinematic quality for me, and I really enjoyed the reading experience. In the end, it was an interesting book - maybe I need a bit more to find out how great it was.

[Fee · Rating 5 out of 5]

I liked this. It was really different and I am finding it hard to review it.

The writing is like poetry in very long paragraphs, using restless phrases, set in precarious situations, and having a warpy sense of reality. It has a mild hallucinatory feeling reminding me of other writers who employ this technique to veil what is happening.

Are there two versions of the narrator? The current one or the one in the past that she refers to as "you"? The relationship with "Moffa" is extrapolated to be negative and shameful. It is never revealed why the narrator went back to see her. What did she want? It's good when things are not explained in well written literature.

The characters are beautifully crafted using few and simple but effective word to describe their mannerisms. I especially liked the little (nameless) girl and her mother. Just perfect!
Nothing really happens except the sense of impermanence, waiting, insecurity, dependence, on the brink of homelessness comes from the nothingness.

If you're looking for a formula story, if you don't understand lodging in England - this isn't for you.

[Danielle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I actually quite liked the perspective of this book, written from the point of view of a lodger who is not only recounting her own experience but an imaginary one of the new lodger that is occupying her last room in a house with a mother and her daughter.

She imagines her creating relationships with the mother and daughter as she did, comparing their differences - including a sexual relationship with the professor, another imaginary lodger.

There was a mysterious quality to the book, with references to the narrators mother, Moffa, who is a well loved actress but seems to be elusive and not have been the best mother figure growing up.

The premise of this book was really original and I think was a really good representation of renting, subletting, or being a lodger from experiences I’ve heard!

Towards the end I feel it got more rambly and surreal, but I enjoyed it on the whole.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a haunting little book. So atmospheric and unsettling, and yet it's very hard to say what it's about, precisely. It's about one woman's trauma. It's about her internal monologue. It's about what we put on display and what that's masking, what we're keeping hidden away.

Pester brilliantly captures the ethereal about living with another person, particularly when your relationship is transactional rather than intimate, familial or otherwise. She also captures social awkwardness and anxiety in a very real way, somehow showing us that smothering feeling that comes with believing we're in the wrong space, we're under the spotlight, we're being mocked.

I wish I better understood what the heck was going on with Moffa - what was she doing that was so mortifying, and why did the whole town know / have thoughts about it?

[Leah Shafik · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting debut novel which follows an unnamed narrator who is giving an account of subletting from someone and her previous experience as a lodger elsewhere but as if it is the new person moving in. Completed stream of consciousness writing which I still can't work if I love or loathe!
Two books I have read similar in style really have stayed with me and this style of writing always makes me think.
I have given this a 3.5 but raised to a 4 because I know I will maybe try and read this again in the future and make notes.
If you enjoy weird, quirky, stream of consciousness, short books, you will like this.
Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.
P.S. I hope this is the final cover - I love it.

[An · Rating 3 out of 5]

The strength of this book lies in its rendition of two different structures or points of view. One involves the narrator visiting her childhood home, while the other imagines someone else referred to as "you" inhabiting places as a lodger (places where she might have lived herself in the past, but it isn't clear). The concept is quite novel, and I liked it. However, ultimately, I didn't find much meaning in the chapters formed as "slice of life" (both the main narrator and the second mystery person whom the MC refers to as "you"). I enjoyed the exploration of belonging (both in a static place and in a stable relationship) and the difficulties of forming human connections with a nomadic existence.
Rating: 3.5/5
Thanks to Granta publications and netgalley for the ARC!!

[Ellen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel so conflicted. Reading this has simultaneously made me anxious and confused, and just overall uneasy. Is this a bad thing? I mean, yes I didn't enjoy reading this book. But then that's what I assume the author wants you to feel, so I can certainly say it was effective. The feeling it invokes in you of feeling stuck in a moment when no one is around, like you don't really exist, it certainly something I've felt before. Following this woman's rambling thoughts of her past landlady and another lodger who shes invented to keep her company in her loneliness is unsettling - I don't know how I'm supposed to feel. The ending left did not give me the staffing feeling I was chasing the whole book so now I'm just sitting here confused ..... 3 stars???