The Lodgers

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Description

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

A woman returns to the small English town she grew up in, to live in a new-build sublet flat overlooking her mother's house. Anticipating a visit from the mysterious other resident, she is always on edge, and her thoughts keep returning to the rented room she has just left, now occupied by a new lodger she has never met, but whose imagined navigation within the house become her obsession.

The minor dramas of temporary living are prised open and ransacked in this irreverent, experimental and boldly stylish novel which examines a life lived in other people's spaces. A subtly political story about dislocation in contemporary Britain, this is a stunning debut from a writer already hailed as one of the best poets of her generation.

Reviews

Holly Pester is a genius and The Lodgers gets into everything that matters -- Kate Briggs
There is no one better than Holly Pester at communicating the eerie, sometimes hilarious and often hallucinatory experience of modern precarity. This is a novel for the age and for generation rent: a captivating and unforgettable account of how economic circumstance can lead to a feeling of being only half alive -- Nathalie Olah
With tang and pith in every sentence, The Lodgers speaks to a generational epidemic of rootlessness and porous selfhood with vital wit and utter originality -- AK Blakemore
A sad strange lyrical story of shame and displacement but whose strength will not let you go -- Sheena Patel
This stylistically eccentric novel holds a pressing, political truth * Observer *
The Lodgers is an elliptical take on the life of those we've come to think of as "generation rent" * Telegraph *
The raging instability of the housing market and its impact on Generation Rent find rare poetic expression in this arresting debut... A novel that sharply captures the precarity of basic 21st-century living * Daily Mail *
Funny, nightmarish and diffuse all at once, but always as sharp as a knife... Fizzing with the life it reflects and played for the blackest of laughs... Serious, sad and darkly comic * Guardian *
Compelling... pleasingly weird... Holly Pester's background as a poet comes through in her visual descriptions * TLS *

Author Bio

Holly Pester is a poet and writer. She has worked in sound art and performance, with original dramatic work on BBC Radio 4, and collaborations with Serpentine Galleries, Women's Art Library, and Wellcome Collection. Her poetry has been published extensively, appearing in Poetry Review, The White Review, Poetry London. Her fiction has been published in Granta and anthologised in Protest (Comma Press, 2018). Comic Timing, her Forward Prize-nominated first full collection of poetry, was published by Granta, 2021. She currently lives in Colchester, Essex.