The Lodgers (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781738009862)

Most Anticipated Books of 2024 mentions in The Telegraph, Guardian, Stylist, and Vice

A dark comedy about lodgings, lovers, and mother-daughter bonds that falter across time and tenancies.

A woman returns to the small English town she grew up in to live in a sublet flat that overlooks her mother's house. Much as she'd like to take charge, be a good daughter, and build a meaningful existence, she is consistently haunted by her childhood self--and by the rented room she has just left. She imagines its new occupant, whose negotiations of the same household and its knotty relationships she sees echoing and eerily confounding her own.

It may be an unhealthy obsession or an imaginative release from her own problems she cannot quite bring herself to define. She is increasingly arrested in the same recursive loop: If we cannot advise our past self with the benefit of hindsight, can we at least counsel those who follow us?

The minor dramas of temporary living--a lack of privacy, the transactional nature of living, and the lasting effects of impermanence--are turned out in this this irreverent, experimental, and boldly stylish novel that examines a life lived in other people's spaces. A subtly political story about Generation Rent, this is a stunning debut from a writer already hailed as one of the best poets of her generation.

"This stylistically eccentric novel holds a pressing, political truth."--The Guardian

"Holly Pester is a genius and The Lodgers gets into everything that matters."--Kate Briggs, author of The Long Form