- Published: 13/02/2025
- ISBN: 9781783789856
- Granta Books
- 224 pages
The Lodgers
Holly Pester
‘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.’
After a year away, a woman arrives back in her hometown to keep an eye on her wayward mother, Moffa. Living in a precarious sub-let, she is always on edge, anticipating a visit from the landlord or the arrival of the other resident. But her thoughts also drift back to the rented room she has just left, now occupied by a new lodger she has never met, but whose imagined navigations within the house and home become her fascination.
The minor dramas of temporary living are prised open and ransacked in Holly Pester’s irreverent reckoning with those who house us. This is a story about what it means to live and love within and outside of family structures. It is also a stunning first novel from a writer already hailed as one of the best poets of her generation.
£9.99
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
M John Harrison, Guardian
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
Claire Allfree, Daily Mail
This stylistically eccentric novel holds a pressing, political truth
Ellen Peirson-Hagger, Observer
From the Same Author
Comic Timing
Holly Pester
Comic Timing, Holly Pester’s extraordinary debut collection of poems, chronicles the experience of living and working as a radical and resistant act. These poems shunt a reader between the political and personal via unique, fragmentary and illusory turns of phrase. Holly tackles marginal bodies, landlords, bog butter, desire, domestic and civic spaces in an unique and illusory voice. She chronicles the prevailing mood of our times, mining radical and anarchic histories to offer a collection of political resistance with both absurdity and seriousness.
These poems interrogate and poke fun at the expectations of people in a commodified culture with a wry humour. Combining a beautifully performed naivety with a profound intellect, this collection is a hugely original approach to a number of pressing issues. Worker’s rights, feminisms, reproductive rights and marginalised bodies and their positions are all through in this startling and innovative voice.
Holly Pester on Granta.com
Fiction | The Online Edition
People Who Live Here
Holly Pester
‘Another man dithering around six foot two had recently moved in.’
A story by Holly Pester, author of Comic Timing.
Essays & Memoir | The Online Edition
Best Book of 1949: The Thief’s Journal
Holly Pester
‘To read it is to feel the alternative tempo in the rude repetitions of the thief who loves to steal.’
