The Hypocrite
Shortlisted for the Nero Book Awards 2024 and longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize 2025
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4.3 • 4 Ratings
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- £5.49
Publisher Description
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
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hamya's provocative second novel (after Three Rooms) lays bare a family's fraught relationships over the course of an afternoon at the theater. Sophia's father, a successful novelist, attends a matinee performance of her play, having no idea until it begins that it's about him. The play recounts a summer holiday in Sicily a decade earlier, when Sophia was 17 and her father insisted she take dictation for the novel he was writing. In flashbacks from Sophia's point of view, she reveals her disgust with her father's misogynistic writing and his philandering, which she dramatizes on stage—in one scene, the character based on her father has sex with a woman in the kitchen of the place where he is staying with his daughter. During intermission, Sophia's father overhears a fellow audience member call the play "social justice for the upper middle class," which prompts him to come to Sophia's defense. During the performance, Sophia has lunch with her mother, who divorced Sophia's father years earlier and who claims her marital duties were a mix of "companionship and coddling." 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.
