The Palm House

by Gwendoline Riley

From the Women's Prize Shortlisted author of First Love

Laura Miller and Edmund Putnam have been friends for a long time. Theirs is a happy meeting of minds, with long evenings spent huddled in an ancient pub by the Thames, where they share office gossip, reflect on their teenage passions, and lament the state of the world.

Recently, though, Putnam has been harder to he has lost his father, and the magazine to which he has dedicated his life has been hijacked by an insufferable new editor, Simon ‘call me Shove’ Halfpenny.

Laura has her own a prickly mother and a tricky past, and in a beautiful and indifferent city, her day-to-day life is precarious. But as Putnam starts to sink into despondency, she must try to bring him back.

A novel of enduring friendships and small mercies, The Palm House offers us Gwendoline Riley’s trademark keen observation and wit, and leaves us - somehow - with a curious sense of possibility.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, British Literature, Novels, London, Literature

209 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 2, 2026

Reviews

[Adina ( not enough time )]

Longlisted for Booker prize 2026
Book 1/13

I had no intention to read this year Booker Longlist. However, after seeing the actual titles, here I am, finishing the 1st book from the list. Probably, not the best choice to start with. Will I read all the list? Most likely not, but I will try to get to as many as I can. Why this change of mind? I am not sure, probably because it seems to be an innovative and interesting list. Also, most of the books on it are short, something I very much prefer nowadays.

I will start my review with the following disclaimer. I listened to The Palm House at the same time I was reading the last 200 pages of The Twins Trilogy by Agota Kristof, a novel which went straight to my favourites shelf. It was very hard not to compare them, and unfortunately for this title, it did not come out well. It was barely ok, the only upside I could find was that it was short and the audiobook narrator had a nice accent.

What was it about? Some guy quits his job in editing and the narrator, who is his friend tries to make him feel better. Not before she starts remembering some apparently random encounters and events from her past. I know I am being fastidious about this (if you read the book you would know why I chose this word), but it is what it is.

I do not know what I should have learned and felt after reading this life vignettes? Should have I been in awe of the sophisticated conversations and of the characters? Should the writing have felt smart? I do not know, all I felt was detachment and total indifference.
Also, one think that irked me was the not so casual way the author introduced vegetarianism as the only way and how it implied that one person got sick because he was eating meat. Yeah, that was probably the only moment this book got any reaction from me.

[Helga Martiros]

Disappointing. The novel tries very hard to sound intellectual, sophisticated and refined, but for me it lacked real depth or emotional weight.
The writing reminded me of James Salter’s in the sense that it focuses heavily on conversations and atmosphere, yet it never truly shines.

The characters were all unlikable.
Veganism and vegetarianism were mentioned as if they automatically made one more enlightened or superior. Instead of adding meaning to the story, those details often felt self-congratulatory and pretentious.
What in the name of all the food gods is a 'vegan sausage roll' anyway? 🙄
Someone the characters know is diagnosed with a disease and during their conversation one of them questions the cause of the illness saying that she (the ill person) was even a vegetarian. What? 😣

Sentences such as "He had a cold, smooth voice, like a heavy pair of scissors cutting rich fabric." and "I assessed my hangover. It wasn't too bad. I felt a bit like a blown egg." were the cherries on top! 🤯🤕

For me it felt the novel was more concerned with appearing intelligent and tasteful than with saying anything meaningful.

[Flo]

Longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize

This is a plotless novel. The fact that the conflict shown in the first part resolves in the fifth was just a forced way to make a novel out of whatever this is. Every part shows Laura, the protagonist, having conversations that feel like negotiations with different men at different times in her life. One is a long-time friend who now has a midlife crisis (Edmund Putman is the only one who is present in the other parts), the second is a celebrity whom teenage Laura idolizes, the third is an established actor with whom she has an arrangement, the fourth is an acquaintance who lets her stay in one of his spare rooms when she is changing houses.

Gwendoline Riley's prose takes some getting used to. It is so restrained, because she wants to tell us so little. She found a way to make even the dialogue distant and unengaging, by starting another paragraph even if it's the same character speaking. It all makes sense to a point, for the kind of character Laura is around men. She is basically in control at all times and always searching to find a way to keep them at a distance, even if they believe something else.

The problem when there isn't a plot to follow is that the new episodes the author proposes must deliver, and The Palm House peaked at part 2. The ending basically tells us that the big scene that will explain everything about Laura won't come for at least some months, maybe years, after this book ends. It's a choice. I can admire it or criticize it, but that doesn't change the fact that the second half was meh.

[Alwynne]

Friendship between a man and a woman, especially an older, hetero man and younger, hetero woman, is something I’ve rarely seen explored in fiction – unless their friendship morphs into romance and/or exploitation. But the enduring bond between Laura Miller approaching forty and Edmund Putnam approaching fifty, is front and centre in Gwendoline Riley’s beautifully-observed novel. Laura and Putnam’s relationship isn’t flawless but it’s a welcome refuge from a challenging, sometimes menacing world. With a deliberate nod to Our Mutual Friend, Riley’s opening plays on that contrast. It’s 2017, Laura and Putnam are having drinks in a riverside pub near London Bridge. Outside murky, polluted skies reflect ongoing climate change. But retreating deep inside, Laura and Putnam can focus on each other, sharing a packet of crisps, split open in, what was, a commonplace ritual of communion. In scenes inspired by Cusk’s Outline, Laura adopts the role of listener as Putnam recites a litany of grievances.

With minimal brush strokes Riley establishes Putnam’s history: ongoing devotion to the arts; a difficult time at a “rough” school with few friends. 25 years at Sequence magazine, one of a tight-knit group of like-minded people. For Putnam this pub’s a potent reminder – personal memory sites are prominent throughout for Putnam, and for Laura, adding a wistful, Proustian flavour to Riley’s narrative. Once-familiar London landscapes have radically altered since Putnam’s youth, now he’s facing seismic change. Sequence has a new editor, a brash “company man” nicknamed “Shove”; he’s moved over from a sports title with plans to shake things up. Shove’s rumoured to be based on Stephen “Stig of the Dump” Abell controversial former editor of the Times Literary Supplement or TLS. Abell arrived from red-top tabloid The Sun – where he gained notoriety supporting an exceptionally provocative, anti-migrant piece by right-wing commentator Katie Hopkins. Riley’s written for the TLS, her ex-husband also worked there. But whatever the sources, Riley’s depiction of events at Sequence forms a persuasive portrait of a rampantly commercialised publishing industry. Now Putnam’s abruptly quit, falling back on an inheritance after his dad’s recent death.

Riley’s narrative’s fragmented, restlessly shifting around in time in keeping with the workings of memory. Laura thinks back to childhood in the Wirral with her grandmother and divorced mother. Their distant, benign neglect left her introverted and self-conscious. At 15 a crush on minor celeb Chris Patrick promised longed-for affection. It became a classically abusive grooming scenario with Patrick a kind of larger-than-life “Russell Brand” figure. Patrick poses Laura like a doll, films them in bed together then sends her off with an STI to remember him by. It’s a chilling episode made more so by Riley’s matter-of-fact delivery influenced by Annie Ernaux’s The Happening. Laura meets Putnam when she’s studying in London. Their bond a constant countering precarity, they’re united by uneasy nostalgia and disillusionment; hyperaware chance can alter the course of a life – from the people they meet to Laura’s unexpected inheritance, just enough for a small flat.

Riley wanted to write about a community of “frightened people” branching out to include the Sequence crowd – Laura’s an honorary member at their gatherings. Some of this tracks back to Riley’s fascination with the houseboat community in Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore clinging to a semblance of an ordered, civilised life despite all odds. But Riley’s characters seem more resilient, managing to carve out spaces of sanctuary, however uncertain. Putnam’s casually-named Cat also gestures to Fitzgerald’s indomitable Stripey – Riley considers cats essential to human happiness and there’s a reverence for animals underlying her story glimpsed in Laura’s vegan beliefs. I wasn’t sure about this one at first, it seemed very different from previous more introspective novels. But it slowly won me over, it’s an impressively intricate piece, incredibly disciplined. A convincing, relatable slice of contemporary life. Riley manages to address weighty issues in an admirably subtle way: capitalism, relentless commodification, the strategies needed to navigate everyday perils against a backdrop of looming climate change. Riley’s minor characters don’t exactly rival Dickens’s but they’re striking too: eccentric, deftly drawn, for Laura, and to a lesser extent Putnam, dangerously mercurial.

Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Picador for an ARC

[Paul Fulcher]

Longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize

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 (Riley has said that she had Penelope Fitzgerald's Offshore in mind, as a small community threatented by change) and a relatively small part of South London (Putnam works in Tooley Street and lives close by in Shad Thames), with 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

The judges' commendation

‘Most chilling story ever told: our literary magazine has got a new editor, and he’s coming in with some big ideas. A note-perfect portrait not only of certain rarefied London intellectual spaces, but also of the people who actually bring their own bloodstreams, histories, tastes, families, first loves, and lonelinesses to them, to make up that impersonal thing we think of as the Establishment. Who, in these places, has power, and how is that power wielded? Are we fated never to get a word in, to remain always a little hungry, a little thirsty – and did we really choose this path because we love literature? Told in a series of thrown spotlights, in some of the best dialogue this side of Henry Green, The Palm House is minimalist, precise, and indelible.’

[switterbug (Betsey)]

[4.6]
Booker Longlist 2026
I bought this weeks before the longlist was announced!

I was a Gwendoline Riley virgin until The Palm House, so forgive me if I haven’t fully understood her through the fog of my instant adoration. What I do grok about this British author is that she is understated and yet forensic in her use of prose. Like a play, characters come on and off or in and out of the various settings. Conversational approach wins here. The author trusts us and doesn’t waste time on exposition. Structure is intrinsic to the story.

The Palm House itself is only mentioned once—I knew it was familiar! But when the narrative revealed Kew Gardens, snap! I went to my photos of 2018 and there it was. I have been pondering its broader meaning in context since I had that self-discovery.

Within the Kew Gardens metaphor is the shielded enclosure (for the oldest potted plant in history). There’s a sense of a fragile protection, or an isolated one—its strength depends on it being scrupulously and gingerly tended to, not taking risks, a containment, a restrained life. It blooms under guard. In Riley’s novel, I see the two main protagonists—writers and platonic friends Laura Miller (40) and Edmund Putnam (49) as withholding—not to each other, as their friendship is so flawlessly portrayed by Riley and comfortable to read—but withholding to themselves. Past trauma has caused them to repress emotions, and safety is their main concern.

They both worked for a highbrow literary history magazine called Sequence. Impeccable name that fits into the structure of the narrative, which is sequential, and a lot happens offstage but not bestowed onstage.

The Sequence customers are lifers, loyal to the magazine. A new editor, “Shove,” takes over and decides that this British periodical needs to go corporate and mimic The New Yorker. Putnam cannot get over it and quits, but he is obsessed with the whole matter and has difficulty moving forward. Every social outing with Laura is hampered by his constant whingeing about the debasement of Sequence. The reader can’t help but agree that Shove made a bad decision, but Putnam is stuck; the narrative so aptly conveys his “insistent, cloying ruefulness.”

I won’t enumerate the storyline—there isn’t an overarching plot. Themes touch on self-imposed emotional and psychological hardship —safety instead of liberty, a bitterness from a fanatical self-absorption. With Laura, a past violation has had its effect-- her mother failed to attend to her, a narcissist who never should have tried to raise a child. That left Laura vulnerable, but I wanted so much for her to be happy. She doesn’t wallow so ostentatiously as Putnam.

I think that the more Riley I read, the better informed I will be about her style. I was immediately attracted to the oblique voice but precise prose. How to be both oblique and exacting? She just does it.

And PS on page 41, Riley uses the term “bovarism,” which I’d never heard of, and instantly apprehended! Bovarism rules in Putnam’s character. Laura is more unambiguous to dissect and harder to heal. Thank you joe evans on Tik Tok, wherever you are, for recommending this book.

[Linda]

Longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize

3.5

Edmund Putnam, 49, worked as an editor at Sequence, a highbrow literary magazine, for twenty-five years. When his boss dies, the Board replaces him with a manager from a sports magazine who wants to make Sequence more informal and trendy, like The New Yorker, and Putnam eventually resigns. He shares his midlife angst with Laura Miller, 40, a contributor to Sequence with whom he has a decades-long platonic friendship. Over drinks and crisps, they ponder their own relevance as the mores and idealism of their youth fade.

Laura is the novel’s narrator. It is composed of short vignettes that move between the present and scenes from her past. Laura is a woman with few meaningful relationships. Snapshots of her past illustrate the underlying causes: the negligence and indifference of her divorced parents, the tenuousness of her early friendships. I was especially moved by the depiction of fifteen-year-old Laura’s first crush and the exploitative sexual encounters with her teen hero, a popular comedian. Laura’s consistent and caring friendship with Putnam provides a stark contrast to the friends and lovers who move in and out of her life.

I like Gwendoline Riley’s writing. Something stark and minimalist in her prose appeals to me. Her characters feel abbreviated, too. At times, I felt like I was watching a play, continually looking for clues.

The Palm House is a subtle character study. There isn’t much of a plot. I recommend it.

[Adam McPhee]

Oh she's doing a caricature of a British comedian. Great, how am I going to figure out who this is? You know it's going to be some guy from the 80s that no one in North America has ever heard of––oh wait lol it's russell brand

[Doug]

Booker Longlist #4

3.5, rounded down.

Only the second Riley for me to have read (First Love being the other), and I fared better with this one - but was still left a bit dissatisfied; in the immortal words of Peggy Lee: 'Is that all there is?' Had it not just been Booker-nommed, I MIGHT have felt more generous.

My main issue was the fact that a lot of this is so UK-centric that a lot of the references didn't resonate for me at all, such that I had to keep looking up items - for example, the section dealing with a comic named Chris Patrick sent me scurrying online to see if this was someone real who I just hadn't heard of - or a fictional character (turns out the latter!).

Much of this was congenially readable and fast-paced, and I appreciated Riley's deft ability with dialogue and characterization, but I'm not quite sure I got the point - is this just a 'the way we live now' sort of tome? It WAS refreshing to see a book in which a long-term relationship between people of opposing genders does NOT need to end in romance and is still satisfying.

Also, it bugs me when a title doesn't really jibe with the story - yes, the Kew Garden palm house gets a very brief passing reference - but then so do bin bags and vegan sausage rolls, which could have served just as well as a meaningless title (... but if someone from the UK can clue me in on a relevance I'm NOT getting, feel free!).

[Kate O'Shea]

The Palm House is only the second novel that I've read by Gwendoline Riley. It is a much more passive and thoughtful novel than My Phantoms. For me it was missing impact in a lot of areas but if you read it as a look at the lives of ordinary people growing older and coming to terms with inevitable changes then it does exactly what I should. I think, after the beginning when dealing with Laura's chaotic (and often dangerous) childhood, I expected more surprises.

However we follow the course of Laura's life working for Sequence, a publication which caters to "young fogeys" and where she becomes friends with Putnam whose nose is put out of joint following the arrival of a new editor who wants to shake things up.

The Palm House is a gentle novel with its characters weaving in and out of each other's lives as they try to find careers and homes where they can be happy - or at least live without mould and caterpillars.

I enjoyed it to a point even if it felt much more disjointed than "Phantoms". I still need to read more by this author. Her prose is exquisite.

Thankyou to Netgalley and Picador for the digital review copy.

[Maxwell]

My first time reading Gwendoline Riley and certainly not my last! What a fantastic writer--her dialogue is impeccable. So true to life, capturing the ways we talk across one another, the things left unsaid in a conversation, the quirks and habits of individual speakers. This specificity is reflected, too, in her prose which is able to convey a scene, paint the picture of where the characters are at emotionally, with very few words. But it's not flowery or lyrical; it's quite simple and easy to read, yet carries depth. I loved it!

This book is about a woman named Laura, presumably in her late 30s/early 40s as she reflects on a few periods of her life, especially in relationship to her good friend, Edmund Putnam, as well as her mother, and a few men she's had brief encounters with throughout her life. A lot of this book is about houses and homes; the very things that offer us security and stability--not just physically but also psychologically. In response especially to the past two decades and the Gen X/Millennials that have lived with so much uncertainty, not geopolitically but also in the housing market.

How do we survive in a world that doesn't seem to care about us at all? What do we have to do, on an individual level, to 'make it'? And what price do we pay for that security? Riley looks at this very subtly, through vignettes of Laura's life, showing various ways people approach the act of existence, contrasting men versus women, younger versus older, and across various fields of work.

But this isn't a book that's screaming these things at you. At its core it's a very well written, character-focused novel that delights in the mundane--capturing the complexity of memories and how they linger in spaces you've lived (the roads you walk down day after day, the pubs you visit year after year, the houses you occupy) and how we move forward without the weight of the things that strive to hold us back.

[David]

I am surprised by how easily I was drawn into the world of these characters. Nothing earth-shattering or unusual happens. There are no grand surprises; no compelling intrigue is afoot. However, it is a remarkably fluid and genuine slice-of-life trip through the very specific quotidian concerns of Laura and Edmund.

Things are presented mostly through dialogue. Internal monologue fills in when conversation falters or when a character is solo. And all of it is incredibly well-written.

I may not remember many of the details in just a few months' time, but the ambience of this novel is likely to stick around much longer.

[Henk]

Longlisted for the 2026 Booker prize
A quiet, slim novel, where we follow two characters in London. They work in publishing, need to contend with corporate changes and have some trauma in their history

I was a bit disoriented in this novel of Gwendoline Riley. She has a very good ear for the vernacular of various UK social classes, and her characters shift through multiple of these classes. While initially Edmund Putnam, an editor of Sequence, a high-brow magazine, seems to be a focus, soon Laura Miller as narrator shows herself to be more interesting. There are a lot of disturbing things in her past, including many instances of misogyny. Yet overall, nothing comes to a climax and the visits to the pub seem to be the main highlights. I enjoyed the novel, certainly it captures the feel of living in London very well, but missed a punch or pay-off, which so far seems to be the theme of the year for me in terms of this Booker Longlist.

[Eric Anderson]

First Impressions
Gwendoline Riley is a well-regarded author who's received considerable award attention over the years, and plenty of readers and critics genuinely love her fiction. I am not one of them. I'd previously read her earlier novel "First Love," which I didn't just dislike but actively loathed, and that's a reaction I don't often have to a book. Going into "The Palm House," I really wanted to give it a fair chance; enough time had passed that I wondered whether my own tastes had shifted, or whether her writing had developed. I read it with as open a mind as I could manage, and found myself bored and frustrated, and at points genuinely agitated by it.

What Actually Agitates Me About Her Writing
I've spent a lot of time trying to work out exactly what it is about Riley's prose that provokes such a strong reaction in me, because normally if a book bores or frustrates me, I just put it down and move on without much further thought. I think it comes down to the cool, cynical, detached quality of her writing, the way we get so little of her characters' inner emotional lives or reflection, so that everything stays observational, looking outward rather than in. This novel is a bit different from "First Love" in that we do get a good amount of the protagonist Laura's backstory, which suggests some kind of development in Riley's approach, or maybe it's just this particular story. Even so, so much about the book frustrated me.

The best comparison I can make is to something that used to agitate me when I first moved to England from America. I struggled for a long time to get used to pub culture, which was so far removed from anything I was used to as a fairly introverted person who'd rather be home reading. My partner and flatmates would encourage me out for a few drinks, and I'd go, have an hour or two of polite conversation with relative strangers, their workmates, people I quite often just didn't have all that much in common with. But once you're at the pub, there's this unspoken expectation that you stay at the pub: someone buys you a drink, so you have to finish it, then it's your round, so you buy drinks for others, and on it goes for hours, long after the conversation has worn down to something completely banal, until you're just drinking for the sake of it. I once tried to leave early and a flatmate told me she'd be genuinely insulted if I did. That experience of being stuck making small talk with people I had little real connection to, listening to stories about people I didn't know and didn't especially care about, is exactly what reading this novel felt like to me.

That's not an abstract comparison, either; it's more or less what physically happens throughout much of the book. People are at the pub, having drinks, opening packets of crisps. There's a small, oddly specific detail I kept noticing, how the novel describes people tearing open crisp packets at the seams rather than just opening them, something I've genuinely observed as a very English habit, and it bookends the novel at the beginning and end. So much of the story unfolds through these conversations, rendered with a kind of sharp, realistic ear for the way people actually talk, repeating themselves, dwelling on details about their own lives that aren't especially interesting to anyone else or, at least, to me. Laura, the narrator, seems to have real patience for all of this. Much of the novel follows her long friendship with Putnam, a man who's just resigned from his position as deputy editor at a longstanding arts and culture magazine, interwoven with episodic glimpses of Laura's own life: her mother, and several of the men she's been involved with over the years.

A Question of Compassion
I don't object in principle to fiction that withholds a character's inner reflections rather than spelling out how the events of their life add up to some larger meaning. David Szalay's "Flesh" does something similar, portraying how people really interact with each other while still conveying a real sense of inner life and humanity underneath it. Riley's writing, by contrast, feels muted, glum and pessimistic to me, and even though Laura never explicitly judges anyone she encounters, that flat, cold observational quality starts to feel like its own kind of judgment: an implication that everyone, and society generally, is simply mediocre, and that this is just something we have to put up with. There's a real lack of compassion in it that I think is at the heart of what agitates me so much, a refusal to find anything in people worth redeeming despite their contradictions, absurdity and ego.
There's one scene that struck me as a rare exception: Laura talking with a friend's young child, who explains her own peculiar theory of how life began on Earth, and Laura simply takes it in, almost visibly absorbing the charm and wit of someone else's point of view. It's a small, genuine moment of warmth that stands out precisely because it's so rare elsewhere in the book. Laura's mother comes across as largely self-absorbed, as do many of the people Laura interacts with. As a teenager, Laura has a relationship with a comedian twice her age who uses her in a cold, clinical way; she never names it as abuse, simply relates what happened without visible judgment. There's a genuinely chilling moment later when her mother's own awareness of that relationship becomes clear, one of several lines in the book that land with real, sudden force.

Where the Novel Does Work
I did find myself engaged by some of the novel's later material, particularly around Laura's independence. When she's about to buy her first apartment, she has an interim period where she stays with a man who's offered her a place, seemingly out of generosity. Nothing untoward happens between them, but there's a genuinely uncomfortable scene where he seems to be quietly judging her, and it becomes clear that even a generous offer like his carries its own unspoken expectations, so that Laura only really finds freedom once she has, in effect, a room of her own. It's harder for me to square that thread of progression with the long-running Putnam storyline, which is driven partly by his own ego and partly by a changing media landscape: a new editor at his magazine wants to overhaul it entirely, leaving Putnam feeling like a relic, and though he resigns, the novel ends with him essentially going back. That's not much of a spoiler, since this isn't really a plot-driven novel so much as an attempt to trace a mood and present a grudging record of the ways we're obliged to be sociable with each other, even as Laura readily keeps showing up at the pub anyway. Putnam observes at one point that pub culture is changing, that people under forty are going out far less than they used to, which does track with a real shift in England, especially since the pandemic, even though the novel itself is set in late 2017.

The novel is carefully anchored in time and place: London's sky is described with the strange yellow hue it actually took on in 2017 from Saharan dust drifting into the atmosphere, and the story opens near the meeting of two bridges in Southwark, the same spot where Dickens's "Our Mutual Friend" begins, situating the novel within a lineage of London writing. As a Londoner myself I could appreciate nods to certain locations I’m familiar with such as The Tate and Gordon’s Wine Bar. But for all that grounding, the version of society it offers felt stripped-down and thin to me, without much real insight on offer, even as I've tried to think harder about what its themes actually amount to.

The Title and Its Symbolism
The title refers to the enormous Victorian conservatory at Kew Gardens, and I saw one mention in the Literary Review that suggests it as a metaphor for English arts and culture as something that has to be sealed off from the wider world in order to produce anything of beauty. Hands recur as a motif too: Putnam has eczema on his hands early in the novel, while Laura recalls a childhood holiday with her mother and grandmother during which she visited a palm reader who somehow caused the warts on her fingers to fall away, a small image of being made new. Inside the Palm House itself is one of the world's oldest potted plants, and a character notes that indoor plants like it need to be largely left alone in order to thrive, not entirely neglected, but close to it. That feels like an apt description of Laura's own life: left mostly to her own devices, including during that relationship with the comedian, which she entered as a fifteen-year-old fully aware of what was happening, even as you can't help wondering where any adult oversight was.

Verdict
There were individual moments and lines in "The Palm House" that genuinely landed for me, sudden and chilling in their effect. But so much of the novel is built from conversations and anecdotes about peripheral people I knew almost nothing about and had little reason to care for, which mostly just underlined a sense of mediocrity, hollowness and self-centredness in the people it depicts. That may well be my own interpretation more than Riley's intention, but it's the effect the book had on me. I don't need fiction to be full of profound exchanges, and I'm equally wary of novels that go too far the other way, the way André Aciman's characters sometimes fall into deep philosophical conversation on a casual night out, which never feels quite real either. But I want more than trivial exchanges about barely-there figures with little bearing on the larger story. I read this one start to finish and genuinely tried to meet it on its own terms, but for me it left an impression of cynicism and detachment I don't actually want more of in my life. Riley clearly isn't a writer for me, though I know plenty of readers feel very differently. I'd love to hear whether you've read her, whether I'm missing something in her work, or whether "The Palm House" might be worth your own time even if it wasn't worth mine.


Read more of my reviews on my book blog LonesomeReader or check out the videos on my BookTube channel or consider joining my Bookclub

[Marcus (Lit_Laugh_Luv)]

My third read from this year's Booker Prize longlist. I'm left feeling like the book passed me by before I could really invest in it — the passivity of the protagonist in combination with the episodic storytelling puts the reader at an arm's length from the events of the novel. While not inherently a bad thing, it does leave me with little impression beyond being nicely written.

The bulk of the novel happens in the periphery, and there's something unapologetically mundane and ordinary about these characters. Nothing they face feels particularly novel or unique; just the mere realities of getting older. Perhaps I've grown jaded from the number of plotless, character-driven stories I've been reading lately, but this landed directly in the middle for me. A completely inoffensive, well-written book without much staying power.

Very sparse, short, and one of the few books I correctly anticipated to make this year's longlist. I think in the context of the entire longlist its inclusion makes a little more sense, though I can imagine this will be one of the lesser loved titles. For a book that is likely to be polarizing, I find myself very middling on it.
---
I bought a copy and it was slightly damaged and I'm mildly devastated about it, but I'm being so brave <3

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[Troy]

Riley is a master prose stylist. Her work is dark, perceptive, ultimately focused in realism. In all her books, especially this one, she doesn’t tell you who the characters are - she shows you who they are through their dialogue and actions. She understands her characters to their core. The prose is also deceptively simple. There’s so much bubbling under the surface if you pause and take the time to think about how she is presenting information to you. This is why she is one of my favourite authors and why her works always have a lasting impact on me. The Palm House was no exception. As I finished the last page I was like, hmmm… but then little details of the text could not escape me as I further analyzed the narrator and her relationships within the novel. I found that the relationships she examines to be interesting, complicated, and new to what she has done before, but also very familiar.

This is worth the read for anyone who has read Riley before, but I still think her best work is found in My Phantoms and First Love and where readers should first start if they are unfamiliar with her work.

[Derek Driggs]

I’ve been a fan of Riley for a while now. I love her realistic dialogue, her wit, her focus on relationships, and her commitment to the mundane. This was as good as anything she’s written.

[Hugh]

Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2026

My seventh book from this year's longlist is probably the hardest to rate. There are strong parts, mostly where the narrator Laura describes her platonic friendship with journalist (Edmund) Putnam, who has resigned his long-standing job at a London magazine after a young editor comes in with silly ideas. The writing throughout is sharp, but for me the sections on other parts of Laura's life and back story were not always as strong, and the whole didn't quite coalesce into a coherent narrative. I wouldn't begrudge this book a place on the shortlist, but I don't expect it to make my top six. The Palm House of the title only gets a brief passing mention.

[Caroline Tenney]

So either I'm crazy, or everyone else is crazy. I read this book after seeing Sarah Jessica Parker rave about it on Instagram. Being a Booker Prize judge, I figured she had good taste. I was wrong.

I didn't enjoy the manner in which this book was written. It took slice of life to an extreme by giving very little actual substance or background to attach to the characters. The reader is a fly on the wall, given intermittent and thin context to barely piece together what's going on, who each character is, and why it's important. It assumes that the reader cares a lot about the characters and wants to unpack every single bit of dialogue for latent meaning, but frankly, I don't want to do that for the length of an entire book. Don't get me wrong, I like some ambiguity in my books, and I don't like when everything is spelled out for me like I'm a child. But when each sentence is ripe for dissection, and I need to sit and think about every page for 5 min to understand what's happened, I'm not enjoying myself. I'm confused and uninterested. I was very close to DNFing, and I honestly should have.

What I will say is that I did enjoy the portions where Laura explored her relationship with her mother. Those were compelling and nuanced vignettes. Her relationship with Putnam and his adventure in kamikaze-ing his life was what originally enticed me to start reading. I love books about complex and imperfect friendship dynamics. Ultimately, it didn't provide a substantive exploration into anyone's dynamics.

[Trudie]

4.5

The Palm House has ricocheted into the top of my Booker 2026 rankings. I love being utterly surprised by a new (to me) author, especially one that I harboured suspicions would serve up artfully styled plotless ramblings.
I mean, this is not exactly a book with a plot either, but it has dialogue-heavy vignettes, and they are superb. I cannot disagree with the Guardian when they say she has a “phenomenal ear for dialogue and is a “laureate of disconnection”.

The reader has to work to piece some things together, but it repays this effort. Apparently insufferable parents are a Riley trademark, and the ones here are indeed delightfully dreadful. But there are many characters you can love to hate in this; of particular note is a central set piece involving a comedian (I could think of a few this could be based upon) that builds so cleverly into something horrific it’s a genius bit of writing.
Could I have wished for more plot? Maybe insofar as I wanted to stay with these characters, to know them more fully ... it just ends conversationally in a pub where it started, with a feeling you only understand fragments of these lives, but maybe that's as it should be.

Quotes that tickled me :
He would literally travel around on his chair, propelling himself from desk to desk as if the room were a screen and he himself a restive cursor.
Her hair was back-combed and piled up into a great frowsy frizzy, intellectual bush-tower.

[peg]

This is the first book I have read from the newly announced Booker Longlist which contains 13 English novels published in the 2025 /26 eligibility window. I found it to be quite interesting and complex particularly in the character development.

The story is presented by a first person, female narrator and includes many different characters, both friends, family, and work acquaintances.
Laura the narrator is a writer in the story which somewhat details the change of editors on a literary magazine plus other characters in her London lifestyle.

The most outstanding characteristic to me was how well she developed each character, both major and minor. They all seemed to be very realistically portrayed in all their differences and somewhat strange characteristics. This seemed much more important than plot development in the book and I am still puzzling over some of their actions. I look forward to seeing what other readers think about this book and suspect there will be many different ideas as to whether it should be selected for the shortlist. Now to read the others and beginning to decide my six favorites!

[Anna]

Like last year’s horrendous Flesh, this is a novel built from clipped conversations, remembered relationships, and acute observations; the difference is that Riley constructs a consciousness you actually enjoy spending pages with. However, I’m not sure why she is telling this story. I don’t feel I’ve quite encountered something in it that justifies becoming a novel.

Well observed, often beautifully written, but I’m not convinced why I should think about these people once I close the book.

[Alexis]

At the time of writing I haven’t actually finished reading this book, but I’m in a fairly foul and wound-up mood at the moment, so let’s try an experiment. If you’re reading this, it means I’ve made it through the last 53 pages and they haven’t changed my mind.

*

I read this book over three days in a haze of indifference. Even by the standards of anecdotal realism this is downright trivial stuff: thin, unpressured, and becalmed. I know we live in an age of runaway praise inflation, but reading the backflap of this book makes me feel like the cuckoos have taken over. Are you telling me that this really “confirms Riley’s position among the finest novelists working today”? I’m supposed to believe that this “confirms Riley as one of Britain’s best?” Are you seriously telling me that “nobody writes better?” Get a fucking grip, because this sort of hyperbole just embarrasses all of us. Look, it’s all perfectly well-balanced and lean, but come on. Make it make sense.

Still, all power to her for winning the Windham–Campbell Prize. A hundred and fifty big ones is a life-changing amount of money to a writer of literary fiction in these illiterate, shitbox times.

[Sarah]

4.5

My first Riley won’t be my last. Her knife-sharp dialogue paired with some really unique conversational structure was a delight. I’m a big fan of middle-age quiet-crises and nobody does moody melancholy better than the Brits.

“Never mind carrying a cross, it felt at times as if Putnam had decided to wear a coffin when he came out for a drink. It was as if he were wearing this coffin and daring us all to say something about it. I imagined a coffin propped up near our table and Putnam occasionally bashing open the lid to shout,
‘Don’t mind me!’
‘Don’t mind me in my coffin, will you?’”

[Ben Dutton]

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.

[Alyssa Corrine]

I disliked this book in a way that baffles me because it’s not like it’s the worst book in the world but it also is a curiosity how something this uninteresting gets to the point of being published. I didn’t care for the storytelling method here, and being haphazardly dropped into scenes throughout the entire book was disorienting. It never allowed me to get into the story. Similarly, the plot felt aimless, and I don’t know what I gained from reading this book, especially considering I didn’t form an emotional connection with any of the characters. They were all essentially amorphous in my mind. The dialogue structure of stacking several comments from a single character over and over was also aggravating and made every conversation difficult to follow…

Yeah. Just makes me think of pretentious, self-absorbed people who think everything that happens to them is the most interesting thing that’s ever happened and now it should be a book. I truly don’t think I liked anything about it and only powered through because it’s short and I spent money on it.

[Darryl Suite]

Lowkey disappointing. I wasn’t convinced or interested in anything to do with Putnam and his storyline. As a whole, this novel felt a bit aimless. MY PHANTOMS was eons better.

Review to come

[Read By RodKelly]

Bit meandering, but I loved the breezy, anecdotal style and the pitch perfect dialogue that made me chuckle quite a bit. Really enjoyed.

[Joy D]

This is a low-key novel about a long-term friendship between two magazine colleagues, Laura Miller and Ed Putnam. In 2017, corporate appoints a new executive, a man portrayed as thinking he knows more than he does, who wants to remake the magazine into a London version of the New Yorker. Putnam dislikes the new direction and leaves after 25 years. The novel then moves back through Laura's history, an unsettling encounter with a sleazeball when she was a teen, glimpses of family life with her mother, and pieces of Putnam's past, before returning to the fate of the magazine.

Riley works in a deliberately quiet register, the accumulation of small, undramatic detail meant to reveal a life at close range. I can see what she is doing but here the characters never became people I cared about, and the fragments didn't come together for me. It is another book on this year's Booker Longlist that left me puzzled as to how it got there. It is competent and controlled, and readers who love Riley's restraint may find more in it than I did.

[Gayle]

I really wanted to like this book. I had it on my to read list before the Booker longlist was announced, but it got off to a bad start for me.

This was due to the dialogue in part 1. I think about Knausgaard writing that “said” is always best, and I know she has read that too, somewhere.

How many times can we say “said” though? Do we always need “he said” “she said”? No we don’t. I’ve read some amazing dialogue, and this wasn’t it. It was staccato, flippant, not interesting in its subject matter, and was absolutely lacking in any kind of depth. I read the first section imaging sitting at the next table to these two and cringing at their clipped sentences. I suppose it’s supposed to show they know each other well and they can “banter”. Erghhhhhhh.

The flow was better in the second part, but the short, clipped sentences continued to bother me.

“She quickly found a job, for instance, after we moved. She was going to work with payrolls, at Cam-mell Laird. She arranged a school place for me. She even outfitted herself with a friend for her Friday night drinks. That was Sally Graves.”

Stac..cat…to
Para..tax…is

Then there’s lines like this:
“Paper bags jinked like fish”.


There’s a lot of….just words most of the time. Not beautiful to read, just words on a page. At times it was better, very readable, I quite enjoyed it, and wished for more for the book. Some big issues brought up, semi-interesting memories of family and family dynamics. Longer sentences, less cringey dialogue and then back to Putnam. (Even writing this name makes me feel angry, such a non character, such a waste of words even having him in the book - yes I get his point and the commentary, but come on AND Sequence - I think I’ll have an eye tic any time I see that word written again!!!!!)

A book that absolutely warns against building your identity around your job. When it doesn’t go the way you expect, which it won’t because nothing ever stays the same, you are left with nothing except to talk about the good old days obsessively over alcohol. If you have similar shell like people in your life, then at least you will have someone to talk to. Lucky for Putman, and unluckily for the reader, he does.

It all just feels like it’s trying way too hard (or not trying hard enough, depending how you look at it). Definitely trying to be clever, often just ending up coming over a bit pretentious and unappealing. Maybe Laura’s teenage trauma (an exploitative fan/comedian situation) made her into a shell of a person? She didn’t seem to have much of a life outside of workmates and pubs. Most of this book just felt like hanging out with exceptionally boring people, and unfortunately for me I’m not a big fan of that.

Putman, he’s unappealing, a very self deprecating man who has a very high opinion of himself nonetheless. (Someone who refers to his dad as “Dad” as if he’s talking to his sister, rather than saying “my dad” - a very big pet peeve of mine 😅). Even his name is unappealing. Without him maybe I’d have enjoyed it more. Who knows? Or is it showing that Laura just settles for what she can get in the way of friends, whether they have value or not? (Due to teenage abuse/relationship with mother/father?). Mixed feelings again, as some parts were very good, but definitely not as a whole. Would I get more from it on a second reading? This is the first Booker longlist book I’ve read this year where I would say a definite no. Or would it answer my questions posed above? One, I think I already know, and two, I’m not going in again to find out, that’s for sure.