The Palm House

by Gwendoline Riley

From the author of My Phantoms and First Love, a droll and quietly evocative novel about work, friendship, family, and the path—so often muddled—toward finding one’s place in life.

In The Palm House, Laura's long friendship with Edmund Putnam is tested when he resigns from Sequence magazine—one of the few places he has ever felt he belonged. Putnam repines. His sweet-natured father has recently died, which has not improved his mood. Meanwhile Laura's relentlessly “outward-facing” mother is still at large and toting a new boyfriend as if he were a marotte. Laura, too, needs a new job, and a place to live that doesn't have centipedes in the kitchen. 

Gwendoline Riley's seventh novel explores acceptance and affinity. Young people don't drink anymore but Laura and Putnam are no longer young. Over wine and crisps the pair reflect on what has brought them to where they are. There are memories of childhood package holidays, teenage friendships and obsessions, peculiar love affairs, bad parties. 

Life is fleeting. Sequence magazine means something, but what? Might Putnam plot a return? The Palm House looks at what it means to find, understand, and accept where one fits.

Genres: Fiction

208 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication April 2, 2026

Reviews

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did look into that, when I got in. I looked at prices for Paris and for Amsterdam. It was an easy thing to talk myself out of, though, when there was still so much I hadn’t seen in London. Putnam and I kept meaning to go to the Cabinet War Rooms. He often said, too, that I should go with him and his father one weekend to visit the ancient cycads in the Kew Gardens Palm House

The Palm House is Gwendoline Riley’s seventh novel and one that while it doesn’t really stretch the boundaries of her work, adds to an impressive oeuvre.

The first person narrator here is Laura, who as often with Riley’s narrators is too busy dissecting the life of her friends and her parents to analyse her own, which emerges in various vignettes, leaving that exercise to the reader. In my review of First Love I said: "It is both a difficulty with but also a strength of the novel, that it is quite hard to piece together Neve’s life, house moves and relationships, but that it also doesn't really matter," which I commented in my review of could be ported over simply by substituting Aislinn for Neve, and here the same would work for Laura.

The novel opens, although not dated, in October 2017 and the dust red skies over London from the Storm Ophelia sand storm, but this is rather a backdrop to the narrator’s conversation with her closest friend, Putnam (clearly his preferred sobriquet rather than Ed or Edward), aged 49 and older than Laura. Putnam has worked at a cultural magazine, Sequence, for 25 years, almost his entire career. Some months earlier a new editor was appointed by the publishing firm that owns the publication, after the death of the long-standing previous editor, and his desire to inject some modern approaches to the rather traditional, 50+ year old magazine (his vision is ‘a sort of London version of the New Yorker’) have gone down badly with the staff, and indeed with the loyal readership (‘of course we want to bring them along if we can’ retorts the new editor), and Putnam has resigned.

The narrator also introduces us to her rather quirky mother (a Riley staple) and the contrast to Putnam is striking:

I once tried to describe my mother's particular way of talking to Putnam. I was trying to nail down something about the mixture of hyperbole and deprecation, about a world where sod's law was the natural law. Putnam, it turned out, was the wrong person to deliberate with.

'Northern,' he said.

'Eh?'

'The word you're looking for is Northern.'

'Everything's a laff,' he said. 'Nothing's to be taken seriously. Nothing's worthy of the slightest bit of respect. Or thought. Nothing can be sat with for even one second. Instead we get this annihilating flippancy. I'm sorry, Laura, I loathe it. It's everything I've fought against for my whole life.'

And she also covers, inter Alia, her absent father, and her brief relationship with a rakish actor, one who indeed seemed to be acting in real-life the part of a rakish actor.

But the novel’s real power is in the portrayal of Laura and Putnam’s friendship as well as their self-limiting view that they don’t deserve anything more, their life confined to a small circle of friends and a relatively small part of South London (Putnam works in Tooley Street and lives close by in Shad Thames), Laura’s rejection (see the opening quote) of a friend’s suggestion that she might eg try a holiday, even a brief city break, rather telling (and they don’t even make it out to Kew and the Palm House).

For now, my new habit was to look around the Tate during my lunch hour. I crossed the river at Vauxhall Bridge. There was the knock-knock sound of my boots on Milbank, the sudden wind, the large leaves cart-wheeling along the promenade.

After work, if I wanted to think about the future, I might have a drink in one of those dark-wood, etched-glass Victorian pubs near Pimlico, sitting on a wobbling stool by the wall.

Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC

[Ben Dutton · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Palm House, the latest novel by Gwendoline Riley, is another striking slice of contemporary life, of a woman - this time Laura Miller - with a complex relationship with her mother and of her friendship with an older man, Edward Putnam (just Putnam to his friends). He is a long term writer with a magazine, Sequence, but about to be shoved out by a new, younger editor. Laura is also adrift in her own way, and the friendship between these two souls forms the backbone of this novel.

I have long admired Riley's fiction - I came onboard with her debut Cold Water in 2002 - and have read everything she has published since. The Palm House treads her familiar themes, but never feels like a repition. From the beautiful opening sentences, Riley grips in a way few manage; she has a sharp eye, and a scapel-sharp style of prose that gets right to the beating heart of her characters. If you've not read her before, this is a great place to start. If you've liked her previous works, this one will be a treat.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.

[chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

gwendoline riley cuts so close to the bone. utter excellence.