Waiting

by Philip Salom

Waiting is a story of two odd couples in prose as marvellously idiosyncratic as its characters.

Big is a hefty cross-dresser and Little is little. Both are long used to the routines of boarding house life in the inner suburbs of Melbourne, but Little, with the prospect of an inheritance, is beginning to indulge in the great Australian dream, which has Big worried. Little's cousin, Angus, is a solitary man who designs lake-scapes for city councils, and strangely constructed fireproof houses for the bushfire zone. A handy man, he meets Jasmin an academic who races in her ideas as much as in her runners. Her head is set on publishing books on semiotics and her heart is turned towards her stalled personal life. All four are waiting, for something if not someone.

'Philip Salom and I once watched a golf tournament together. A mutual friend was caddying and we talked along the fairways, discussed things in the long grass and conversed among the trees to the sound of light applause. I knew Philip was a poet but it was obvious to me by the final round that he was also a wonderful storyteller. As you are about to see, I was right.' - John Clarke

'Philip Salom's Waiting is a strangely compelling bittersweet tale of the marginalised and the searching. From a rooming house to the world of academia, the novel shimmers with a cast of larger-than-life characters - Big and Little, Angus and Jasmin. Weirdly moving, tender, and insightful.' - Antoni Jach

'Stories with flashes of poetry and sudden insight and such profound compassion that they should be labelled ' Could make the reader kinder.' Send a copy to a politician.' - Sue Woolfe

Genres: Australia, Fiction

313 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2016

Reviews

[Lesley Moseley · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 1/2 stars, but it SHOULD have been 4 stars except the first 142 pages SHOULD have been better edited. I skipped and skimmed a lot of this, but am so glad I kept reading. Philip Salom has a fantastic way with words. Well deserved nomination to the Miles Franklin Short list. " Waiting, changes a person ".. "Her anger Viagra is a thing to behold"...

[MisterHobgoblin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Melbourne’s rooming houses are a step up from homelessness, but sometimes only just. Big and Little have seen the worst of them: violence, drugs, theft, danger. But their current rooming house in North Melbourne has a better vibe; some of the residents are a bit odd; there’s one who sits in silence in the common room; another who has set himself up as the gatekeeper. And there’s Big, a large transvestite on the cusp of reaching senior years; and his companion Little, a small, mousey woman with lupus. Little has been waiting to inherit her mother’s house in Adelaide for a long time and has dreams of a stable home; Big is not so sure. So they spend all day, every day, wandering the streets and discussing the possibilities, quietly observing the colourful characters all around them.

Meanwhile, there’s Angus and Jasmin. Jasmin is an academic and Angus is a garden landscaper who designs fireproof houses. Angus is on a mission to make his life intersect with Little.

What unfolds is a really engaging story of life on the margins. Big and Little are not sorry for themselves; they are actually pretty happy within their own world. They don’t aspire to work or extravagance. They don’t want fast cars. But they do crave a little bit of security. They are vulnerable and they know it.

The story, in the main, follows twin tracks: the destiny of Little’s inheritance and a threat to the composition of the rooming house. Both these lines cause Big and Little to rise up from their torpor and engage with the wider world.

The story is well told and genuinely intriguing. But the real beauty is in seeing these rooming house residents as real people; quirky, marginalised (often for good reason), frustrating and occasionally terrifying. But nevertheless as real people with valid aspirations and as much a right to a stake in society as anyone else. The writing is vivid; the voice is comic. The novel employs a narrator whose eccentricity fully equals the subject matter; he is a very present and judgemental narrator who almost defies the reader to disagree with him. He, as much as Big and Little, is the star of the show.

If there is a down side, it is Jasmin. She seems to exist only to add depth to Angus and the sections in which she and Angus are together feel like dead weight. Perhaps we would miss her if she were not there, but it doesn’t make her any more interesting when she is. This is a minor quibble, though, in a book that is otherwise fantastic.

Waiting comes highly recommended.

[Mandy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't know Philip Salom but accepted the invitation to his party because his guest list looked fascinating and full of potential I got there at the appointed time and waited and waited and waited, Philip talked on and on and on. It must have been about dawn when the promised guests turned up, by then, I was so tired and ticked off at being kept waiting for so long that I stayed long enough to meet everyone and went home, leaving Philip Salom to it.

[Cara · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had to read this for my university and for my course I wrote my podcast on this novel. Not exactly positive. Here is 10 minutes of spoilery talks in word form:




Waiting is an Australian Novel by Philip Salom. And it truly is an Australian novel. This is the kind of novel that would require footnotes in a different country. This novel is full of slang, exclusively Australian things, and Australian ideals. If you take the Australia out of this novel, this novel wouldn’t exist. It is heavily reliant on the culture, and on the readers knowing and understanding the culture.

With reviews like “Waiting is full of delightful complexity” and “I knew Philip was a poet… but he is also a wonderful storyteller” I had high hopes for this novel.

Now, I don’t know about anyone else, but I did not enjoy this book - I’d say sorry but I’m not. Before I delve into the story, I just want to give a little overview as to why this story didn’t work. This story is character driven, but throughout this entire story I was unable to connect to any of the characters. The big issue that causes this is that this book has a bad habit of going against the “golden rule” of show don’t tell. For example, if someone is sad, you could show this with something like “she swallowed around the lump in her throat and blinked back tears” - not the most inspired sentence but you understand she is sad or upset without simply saying “she is sad”.

This story is simply telling me what is happening instead of showing me and therefore I am unable to connect to the story. Due to this story being character based, it is so much harder to get through the story.

Another very irritating (from a reader’s standpoint) part of this novel is the dialogue. The dialogue in this book is different, which at first, is almost charming. It tells the story in an interesting way. However, as the story progresses, it becomes difficult to know who is saying what. What is thought and what is said? Who is saying and thinking these things?

Perhaps this was the goal, to confuse and to blur the lines between thought and action, between what we want to say and what we do. Or perhaps I’m trying to come up with a way in which this story telling makes any sort of sense. As an academic, there is merit to these ideas, I suppose, but as a reader, boy oh boy did it continuously make me frustrated. How is a reader supposed to follow the story, to connect to these characters, if they can’t even understand the dialogue?

Peter Kenneally from the Sydney Morning Herald commented that “In this novel, poetry is always present, doing its job without slowing things down.“ Perhaps this is a factor into my dislike for the book- the poetry. Though I disagree with his statement about how it doesn’t slow things down. This book read rather slowly for me and it seemed to drag on and on without anything happening.

Okay, enough of that -- onto the story.

It is interesting that the first two characters we are introduced to are called “Little and Big”. These are the names they chose to give themselves and this is how they are referred to. It’s incredibly symbolic, but I’ll get back to that later.

They are doing something typically Australian- shopping in IGA. It sets up the story perfectly, for better or worse.

The plot is not overly complicated. There is no great quest, no major mystery, no exciting plot device in the beginning that sets the story in motion. It is simply about two sets of people, living their life, and how their lives connect. Not the most exciting plot but I think we can all agree this story is not really about the plot.

The characters are strong- Salom knows who they are and how he wants them to be presented. Some characters may be under-developed, or only mentioned in passing, but it is easy to tell that Salom knows everything about these characters. The problem, however, is the disconnect that is created by the writing style of this novel. Credit where credit is due, even though I was constantly forgetting who was who, once I remembered I knew exactly who they were. The fact that I kept forgetting names could be simply a “me” thing as opposed to a problem with the writing but I do believe that writing style heavily impacted my memory of characters. However, once I was able to connect the name to the character it was clear who they were- I knew that Angus was a landscaper who can be a little socially awkward but I didn’t always remember his name. Big and Little were easy to remember, obviously, but Jasmine, whose name constantly alluded me, is clear to me as the university lecturer who has a lot of book based knowledge.

This then brings me to the idea that the men in this story are favoured over the women. Not necessarily in quantity but in quality. There is more information about the Sheriff and who he is as a person than Julia. All the women are also docile and non confrontational. Not one female character truly stands up for herself. Angus does. Big does. The only woman who stands up for herself is Angus’ mother and she is seen as a bitch and a horrible person because she is cruel and demanding. And both Jasmine and Little are in relationships that aren’t good for them in the end. Big deceives Little and constantly goes against her idea of a new life. He embarreses her constantly. It might not mean that they are terrible people, but they aren’t a good couple. It’s almost like they are together because nobody else would be with them and thats not a good reason. Jasmine and Angus seem only to argue and have sex. That’s about it.

Lets discuss how Salom discusses controversial topics. While, yes he discusses sex, that is more along the lines of “taboo” as opposed to controversial. By that I mean the fact that Big, one of the main characters, is a cross dresser. Salom puts a lot of effort into discussing why he chooses to dress in womens clothes and how uncomfortable he is in mens clothes but there is an unspoken line between crossdresser and transgender. Big is never implied to be transgender, there is the constant use of the he/him pronouns and at one point it is addressed that Big isn’t trans, however the way in which the language around transgender people is used is quite derogatory. While it makes sense is the world of the housing people, it raises the question on whether or not Salom is taking transgender people and their experience into account. It should be common practice that when writing about something in life you have no way of experiencing (such as a straight person talking about being gay or a cisgender person talking about being trans) they should do a fair amount of research in order to give accurate representation. It doesn’t seem as though he is interested in accurately portraying trans people or the differences between a crossdresser and a trans person.

In a similar way to Gerald Murnane’s “When the Mice Failed to Arrive”, Salom has a pedophilic character, and, also like Murnane, the pedaphelia is small, like a passing comment. Almost like talking about his hair colour. And after thought. “Oh by the way, this character also likes to have sex with boys much younger than him, he also has blue eyes and a nice smile”. Now, a pedophile in a novel being normalised is a big NO. This is not something that should be normalised because it justifies the actions and validates pedophiles. This should not exist in the world. In Waiting, Tom is a so called “changed man” and he turns to christianity. But it is shown in the book that he is not as ‘pure’ as he thinks he is. It is unclear if he went to therapy or if he actually changed in life. There is also a connection between priests and young children (particularly boys) who are sexually abused in church. It might not be an intentional connection but it is there nonetheless.

The question that arises from this is why Salom has included these things. It is possible they were placed into the novel to start a discussion on people, which is likely, but it is also a possibility that they were placed for shock factor. This brings up the conversation on how to deal with controversial topics or taboo topics within novels. Would it have been better to not include them at all? Perhaps it would have been better if it was handled a little differently?

Now lets talk about the names within the story. Big and Little are the obvious start. It is explained later on in the book that they chose a name that they found fit them best and dislike the sound of their given name. This also applies to the Sheriff. It’s interesting that they are named after the most important fact about them. Big is big. Little is little. The Sheriff is a Sheriff. Big enjoys using his size to intimidate people as he doesn’t actually like to fight. He has no problems with his size and enjoys being who he is. Little also enjoys her size. She likes how she compliments Big and that she can use her size to her advantage. The Sheriff is constantly on duty in his mind. He likes conflict and has no problem putting people in their place. He fears the day that he has to retire from his work and become somebody else. The names that these people choose for themselves are incredibly symbolic and attatch neatly to the characters. There are, of course, the others in the novel who choose their own name, but they are much lesser characters and we are out of time.

What did you guys think of this novel?

[Cass Moriarty · Rating 2 out of 5]

Waiting (Puncher & Wattmann 2016), by Philip Salom, has recently been longlisted for the Miles Franklin, so clearly it is ticking all the right boxes for some, but I'm afraid I just didn't get it. This may say more about my lack of propensity to comprehend the profound rather than any lacking of the book itself. As with any work of fiction, a great deal of work has gone into the making of the world in this book, and the narrative and characters appeal as charismatic and eccentric - Big (a hefty cross-dresser) and Little (who is little). The plot is about academia and the Great Australian Dream and houses built to withstand bushfires, the characters '...waiting, for something if not someone'. Unfortunately I did not discover if they found what they were waiting for, as I did not finish the book. I suspect, however, that for certain readers this story, with its existential and semiotic parables, will hold an almost cult-like attraction.

[Jennifer (JC-S) · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘Their two figures move up and down, and onwards as always.’

I picked up this novel, read the first paragraphs, started recognising people and wondered where Mr Salom came to know them well enough to include them in this marvellous novel.

No, I’ve never lived in a Melbourne rooming house, but I’ve had friends who lived in similar places in Canberra and elsewhere. I never knew who I might meet either late at night or early in the morning. But I’ve already digressed. Back to Big and Little who were (for me) the two main characters in this novel. Big, the hefty cross-dresser, reminds me of a similar character I used to meet on my early morning walks. Little, who lives with lupus, brought back memories of a family member with lupus. Both the people I am reminded of are now dead, which somehow made both Big and Little more real.

Here they both are, living in a rooming house in Melbourne’s inner suburbs. And, being a rooming house, the place is full of colourful characters some of whom occupy their own alternate worlds much of the time. Little has the prospect of an inheritance from her mother. Not, though, if her aunts can prevent it. Big is worried about any change to the status quo, and the pair of them walk around the streets of Melbourne observing others and talking about the possibilities that Little’s mother’s home in Adelaide might offer.

There are two other major characters as well. Meet Angus, a landscape gardener, who is Little’s cousin. His mother wants him to meet Little. Angus meets Jasmin, an academic. While Jasmin did have much impact on me, she too is waiting.

In addition to waiting for Little’s inheritance, Big and Little become energised when a change to their rooming house is proposed which would seem the common space removed to make way for more boarders.

Big and Little live their lives on the margins in a world that most of us do not see and (if we do) rarely understand or appreciate. They are both vulnerable (as are Angus and Jasmin, in different ways) and they are aware of this. Both crave security but have different views about how to attain it.
I finished this novel full of admiration for the way in which Mr Salom brought both people and place to life.

Highly recommended.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

[George · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting, good humoured novel about two odd couples living in suburban Melbourne. Big is a hefty cross dresser, gambler and his partner, Little, is little. Little’s mother is dying and lives in Adelaide, (Gawler). Little is the only daughter and is expected to inherit her mother’s house. Her mother’s sisters claim they should have the house as they have cared for Little’s mother. Little has barely made contact with her mother over the last few years. Alongside this story is one about Angus and Jasmin. Angus is a landscape gardener and a son of Little’s mother’s sister. Angus meets Jasmin, an academic tutor specializing in ‘Semiotics’. Angus is divorced. A house in the Adelaide hills burnt down, that Angus had designed as ‘fireproof’.

Big and Little live in a commune house…a boarding type home where an interesting array of characters live together in harmony. They generally live off a pension of sorts. Their histories involve criminal activity, drugs, and homelessness. ‘The sheriff’ acts like the house’s muscle man guardian. Tom, is the once pedophile, now a born again Christian. Dazza, is the spitter. Tourie, is a young man with Tourette Syndrome. Julie, who dresses and acts like a tart. Julie brings home a nasty boyfriend who causes quite a scene, causing ‘the Sherriff’ to take action.

The novel brings together individuals who are mismatched, solitary, vulnerable, interdependent, and waiting for something to change.

A very satisfying, enjoyable reading experience.

This novel was shortlisted for the 2017 Miles Franklin Award.

[Alex Rogers · Rating 3 out of 5]

Huh, a really interesting book. Salom's writing is amazing - lovely facility with language, words, whimsy, a piercing turn of phrase. The characters are outlandishly strange, and yet familiar, I got sucked right into their lives. Funnily enough, not so much the main characters Big & Little particularly - I liked Little, but never got to grips with big. But the cousins, the boarding house crew, the overall motley cast were fascinating, and I got very invested in the progress of the boarding house. The book often got too clever for its own good - the wordiness of the academic character was unnecessarily overblown, and her attraction to the landscape tradie didn't feel right. But overall the book is unique, and I enjoyed reading it.

[Lisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Last year, I read all the books on the Miles Franklin shortlist and the one I liked least won. Based on that, I fully expected Waiting to take home the prize. It was a pleasant surprise that it didn’t. That’s not to say that Waiting is a bad book – just that it’s not to my taste. Philip Salom’s writing is awesome and there are nice scenes. But I struggled to comprehend the point of the novel, what the overarching story was. I didn’t care about the characters, couldn’t get a grip on them. In short, I have no real idea of what happened in Waiting but I am in awe of Philip Salom’s writing skill.

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked this contemporary novel set in Melbourne. It was blurbed by John Clarke, which must have been not long before he died (and mentions him in the text), and Clarke's incisive yet humanistic commentary on society is evident within the pages, which focus on four characters: two from the fringes of society who live in a rooming house in North Melbourne and struggle to make their way in the world and an academic and a landscape gardener who are falling in love. Salom is a poet and it shows in his prose. Long listed for this year's Miles Franklin Award.

[Kimberley Kanages · Rating 4 out of 5]

Once I fell into the style of prose here and got to know the characters this book became much easier to read.
Little was the standout for me. What a champ.
However I feel that most of the time Salom was sitting there showing us how intellectual and clever he is by writing without punctuation. I had to imagine this as spoken word to finally fall into the story.
I think I would rate this as a high 3.5.
I loved the story - loved the characters - but the style and the intellectual public wankery (perfectly Melburnian) I may have done without.

[Michelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

Abandoned at 142. I could not continue. I don't know if it was the book or if it was me but it just wasn't working.
Nothing happened! Apart from shopping and background checking. The cousins hadn't even met at 142.
Yes, I appreciate the prosy style, but at times it interfered with the story. And when nothing happens that doesn't help.
Waiting. For something to happen.

[Corey Zerna · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m disappointed to be only giving 2 stars, but one star is for the story line/plot, which is quite lovely, and one star is for the ending - endings are one of my bug-bears - but this ending is great
What’s not good is the writing - the first half in particular almost made me put the book down, which I am loath to do - it was a difficult read

[Neilatkalleroo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I struggled with this one, and after thirty or so pages I resorted to speed reading, flicking through the pages and reading a sentence or two per page. But the story sucked me back in, and I read the last two-thirds at a normal pace. Intriguing characters in a gentle-paced story where nothing much changes, but everything changes. And interesting little sketches. I'm glad I persevered.

[Robert Connelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once again, Philip Salom delivers.
His characterisations of the disadvantaged is exceptional. Without, in any way being demeaning, he makes real loving people out of the marginalised, the ones we pass in the city streets daily, ignoring them with hardly given them a second thought about them being real people.
Thank you Philip Salom.

[Lee Bramley]

Very well written it was a narrative about 4 people from another's perspective. I didn't enjoy it, not sure why. Very slow moving very little happened. Only reason i finished it as it was for Book Club.

[JESH · Rating 3 out of 5]

An unusual novel set in a boarding house home of down-and-ours, drunks, misfits who nevertheless form a caring community. Little, a tiny lupus sufferer, her partner Big a crossdresser, a semioticist and an unqualified landscaper. Empathetic, unexpected. Won some awards.

[Lauren Riots · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved the descriptions of inner Melbourne rooming houses and the characters that inhabit them, the delicate balance. Some lines really hit home for me.

[Tomas Correia · Rating 4 out of 5]

The writing is gorgeous, but you have to be in it for the characters, not the storyline. I found that it was a book to read in small chunks at a time.

[Ralph · Rating 4 out of 5]

Suspense, from lack. This is a really strong debut that justifies the title!

[Magdalena]

There is something unsettlingly familiar about Big and Little, the protagonists of Philip Salom’s Waiting. These are people who exist just at the periphery of consciousness, walking together uncomfortably to the local supermarket, getting on the tram, or passing us on the street. They’re invisible in plain sight, marginalised, hurting, full of hard won wisdom, uncomfortable, and waiting. Salom has made Big and Little the heart of his novel, and they are both compelling and unsettling. They’re compelling because they’re a rich combination of the flawed and loveable. Their interdependence, “as inseparable as they are in syntax…”, and oddness is offset by a world that has allowed them to become so vulnerable. They are unsettling because we immediately recognise the suffering they endure: Little with her Lupus and anxiety that is exacerbated by her petiteness, and Big, who is big of voice and body, “huge gut and hairy Popeye forearms”, but who also dresses in tight floral dresses with matching handbags, socks and coloured flat-heels.

The incongruity of Little and Big’s partnership is mirrored by the other couple of the novel, Angus, an earthy landscape designer, and Jasmin, a semiologist professor who meets Angus at a party. The alternating and disparate plotlines link up when it turns out that Angus is Little’s cousin that he hasn’t seen in years, despite the fact that the two of them live quite close to one another. Angus sets out to find Little when his mother gives him a directive to talk her out of accepting the house that Little’s estranged mother has promised to leave her when she dies.

As you might expect in a novel by one of Australia’s most exciting poets, Waiting is full of delightful complexity. For one thing there’s the boarding house that Big and Little live in: a mini-universe for the down-and-out. I immediately thought of Audre Lorde’s poem “Rooming Houses are Old Women”. The house is both oppressive and comforting – a symbol of the inhabitant’s reduced status in society as well as a place of safety against a harsh world—a place for the world’s cast-offs to support one another. Much of the plot revolves around Little’s hopes of leaving the house and buying a proper home for her and Big to live in once her mother dies. The boarding house is an odd parallel to Little’s long escaped home in Adelaide where the grubby extended family that Big has dubbed “The Ugly Sisters” jockeys for an inheritance that has been promised to Little.

There are many kinds of homes throughout Waiting. Angus has lost his home to fire and is trying to help others keep theirs through the fire-proof houses he designs and builds. Both Angus and Little have left their oppressive families behind and created a new ‘temporary’ life that is both comfortable and stagnant. Jasmin, who meets Angus at a party, reads ‘public spaces’, something that hints at the tension between public and private spaces throughout the book – the distinction between home and not-home; inside and outside. Big’s own reluctance to move from the temporary home he’s become accustomed to is indicative of the struggle that all of the characters go through, a tension against change that the waiting represents:

The sounds he is making are no longer recognisable as speech. Not as common speech, not even uncommon speech – he is doing the kiddie thing of hoping it will all go away, trying to re-jig reality by a droning sound set up between the world and himself. It begins deep inside his diaphragm and with his eyes shut it vibrates up through his chest and into his sorry neck muscles, and rattles the inner shelves of his head. Things are bouncing on them. On and on. (241)

Much of the writing is exquisite, sliding into an abstracted dreamlike poetry that manages to progress the narrative thread while expanding the perspective outward:

It is an epiphany, as she waits there is the blue light with the windows open and he nursing home verandah bathed in the bliss of final decisions, but looking more like starlings in full tweet among the crumbs and cars, their rooves of overheating metal in the carpark. All this, expanding into a new innocence in the sunny afternoon like heaven in her thoughts. (51)

Although there are serious themes running throughout the book, Waiting is incredibly funny at times. Salom’s characterisations are Dickensian in the detail in which he describes the idiosyncratic qualities of even minor characters such as the bossy and sometimes violent Sheriff, Angus’ dreadful mother dubbed “The Wicked Witch” by Little, Tom, a former paedophile who “has been born-again so thoroughly he’d make up whole footie teams of Jesuses” (28), Tourie, a young man with Tourette’s Syndrome, or Dazza the spitter:

He is a Dazzling spitter. Leading from the front and bringin up the contents of the unconscious – this man hoiks up noisy things from his throat and propels them into the garden and onto the tree. It is done without great extension, just a slow leaning back of the head then a sudden forward slingshot - it flies above the paving stones and splats onto the trunk of the orange tree. Trees and Eden and this big Adam in the sun: he coughs and coughs to hoick and sling. (138)

Ultimately, what makes Waiting such a wonderful book is that Salom treats all of the characters in this book, even the most miserable, with a deep-seated sense of shared humanity. However dark the world that these characters inhabit, and it can be quite dark at times, this is what we all look like. Salom’s writing is always light, good humoured and non-judgemental. This is the human condition: oddly shapen, oddly matched, solitary, inter-dependent, vulnerable, and always waiting for something to change. It’s repulsive and loveable all at once. Waiting is critically important – a novel that tells little and shows much, leaving its readers full of fresh insight.

[Ann Graham · Rating 4 out of 5]

A story of life in and around the clients of a boarding house in Melbourne. Salon has an incredible way with words. Initially I found his style quite difficult, but once into the rhythm, I happily became involved in his story, a story filled with wonderful quirky characters, most of them at the lower end of the socio-economic ladder. Their back stories are scant but their lives are rich and colourful.

[Julie Bye · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found the train of consciousness writing style a bit hard to get into,but eventually managed to concentrate long enough to appreciate the author’s skill in drawing his cast of quirky characters. Characters who, if you ran into them on the street, you’d turn away. But together they form an interesting support system for each other until the council threatens to remove the common room of their hostel. Big, a cross-dressing ex chef lives with Little, a teacher suffering from Lupis and anxiety and too sick to work. The promise of inheriting her estranged mother’s home has Little thinking about a different life. You come to care for this odd bunch of people, and the unusual writing style suits the weird characters, but if you’re not willing to give this book your full attention the text will wash over you without comprehension.