From a fiercely talented writer poised to be a new generation’s Rachel Cusk or Deborah Levy, a novel set between the London stage and Sicily, about a daughter who turns her novelist father’s fall from grace into a play, and a father who increasingly fears his precocious daughter’s voice.

“A sharp book, beautifully written.” —Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind and Entitlement

“Excellent…I enjoyed the novel hugely…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. But The Hypocrite is a strikingly original book too. I tore through it, shoulders clenched but full of admiration.”
 —David Nicholls, author of One Day, in Electric Literature

August 2020. Sophia, a young playwright, awaits her father’s verdict on her new show. A famous author whose novels haven’t aged as gracefully into the modern era as he might have hoped, he is completely unaware that the play centers around a vacation the two took years earlier to an island off Sicily, where he dictated to her a new book. Sophia’s play has been met with rave reviews, but her father has studiously avoided reading any of them. When the house lights dim however, he understands that his daughter has laid him bare, has used the events of their summer to create an incisive, witty, skewering critique of the attitudes and sexual mores of the men of his generation.  

Set through one staging of the play, The Hypocrite seamlessly and scorchingly shifts time and perspective, illuminating an argument between a father and his daughter that, with impeccable nuance, examines the fraught inheritances each generation is left to contend with and the struggle to nurture empathy in a world changing at lightning-speed.

BIO

Jo Hamya is the author of Three Rooms and has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, and the Financial Times, among other publications.

REVIEWS

One of the Best Books of August from The New York Times and The Week
A Most Anticipated Book from Town and Country, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, and The Millions

“A brilliant litmus test of a novel…What Hamya brings to this modern debacle, besides a precision of language and an aptitude for structure that ought to make her contemporaries quake, is a tenderness you don’t see coming.” -- The Atlantic

“Impressive…[The Hypocrite‘s] pleasures are in the swift, agile way that Ms. Hamya flits between the characters’ thoughts and the past and present…This is an intense, onrushing, highly pressurized book, best experienced in a single sitting, like a play.” -- Wall Street Journal

“Excellent…I enjoyed the novel hugely…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. But The Hypocrite is a strikingly original book too. I tore through it, shoulders clenched but full of admiration.” -- David Nicholls, author of One Day, in Electric Literature

“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.” -- Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind

“Witty and devastatingly acute.” -- The Guardian

[H]  Pantheon Books  /  August 13, 2024

0.96" H x 10.47" L x 5.84" W (0.82 lbs) 240 pages