A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN TIME, THE DAILY MAIL, THE INDEPENDENT, GOOD HOUSEKEEPING AND THE ATLANTIC
‘Like Edward St Aubyn and Anne Enright, Hamya is so good on generational conflict, the friction of family, and the damage done by charming but complacent men’ DAVID NICHOLLS
‘A slippery, excellent exploration of sexual politics, creative appropriation, and family dynamics . . . It lands its ending with all the force of a sharp knife hurled at a bullseye’ VANITY FAIR
Sicily, 2010. Sophia, on the cusp of adulthood, spends a long hot summer with her father, a successful author. Over the course of that holiday, their relationship will fracture.
London, 2020. Sophia’s father, now 61, sits in a large theatre, surrounded by strangers, watching his daughter’s first play. A play that takes that Sicilian holiday as its subject and will force him to watch his purported crimes re-enacted. Set over the course of one climactic day, this is the story of a father and a daughter, of all that divides and binds them.
‘Wickedly funny. A perfect novel’ SARAH BERNSTEIN
‘Brilliant . . . With a precision of language that ought to make Hamya’s contemporaries quake and a tenderness you don’t see coming’ ATLANTIC
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Reviews
An astute, funny-sad analysis of power, perception and memory that questions the value of art and the responsibilities - and egos - of those who make it
A darkly comic family drama that keeps us guessing right up to the end . . . Hamya's prose is crisp and fluid
Caustically funny
None of the characters escape Hamya's bemused and excoriating view, nor are there any easy answers to the questions raised about expressions of gender and privilege in art. Fans of Anne Enright's The Wren, the Wren ought to take note
An even-handed cultural satire targeting social media-powered morality in the twenty-first century. Written with cool precision as well as barely veiled glee, it confirms Hamya as one of the sharpest new writers around.
Sharp, witty and astute about parents and children, but never cruel; I enjoyed it hugely
Hamya deploys a fluid prose style . . . What is real, what is imagined, what is performed: In Hamya's confident hands, it all becomes productively confused . . . When Hamya allows her characters to live, breathe, spit and snarl, her fiction soars
The Hypocrite is a sharp book, beautifully written. Jo Hamya poses complex questions - about art and ethics, family life and sexual mores - and withholds from her reader any easy answers
An intense, onrushing, highly pressurized book, best experienced in a single sitting, like a play
The plot moves with a smooth economy, brilliantly satirising all kinds of pretension, while offering psychological insights
The layered narratives gradually create a collective moral clarity that transcends any individual perspective...I closed the novel with the strange feeling that the characters might have benefited from an experience only accessible to the reader - that of studying each other's scripts on the same page
Ingenious . . . all the various strands braid into a fraught, compelling conversation, not just between parents and children, but between generations, and even between modes of art and understanding
I thought The Hypocrite was brilliant. Thrilling and unpredictable, as a story of misunderstanding and failed connection, told with a dreamy, Sofia Coppola-esque quality. As a portrayal of artistic creation fuelled by bitterness, The Hypocrite uncovers an uncomfortable truth: how a piece of art can both unify and alienate
The Hypocrite is a brooding, taut novel
The Hypocrite is an acid chamber piece that skewers the father, mother and daughter at its heart without denying them their messy, affecting humanity. It's tense, it's painful, it's funny. I loved it
I relished the original emotional pulse of The Hypocrite, a compulsive tale of a reckoning with memory and responsibility played out in real time
Hamya writes with real wit. Her style has rightly been compared to Rachel Cusk's. With this original novel - sensitively observed and artfully paced - she breaks out into something of her own
Sharp and agile...Hamya's staging is savvy; each scene is packed with implication and, often, wit
A taut, poised portrait of a father-daughter relationship and the attitudinal clash between generations
The Hypocrite is engrossing, acerbic and elegantly executed. Jo Hamya artfully reveals her characters' flaws and vulnerabilities with humour, wit and style
I loved Jo Hamya's elegantly plotted and wickedly funny The Hypocrite. A perfect and perfectly merciless novel
A funny, painful and poignant picture, looking at the subjective natures of memory and writing and the humiliation of being observed.
A sharp, insightful read
[A] clever study of art, dysfunction and generational difference . . . a well-wrought and very clever book