Pe's Reviews > Three Rooms

This was my favourite read of 2020, and the best debut I've read in a few years.

The prose was faultless. I honestly was blown away by pretty much nearly every page. I really do believe that that the author will be a major literary voice – Literary with a capital L. One of THREE ROOMS key strengths – in sharp contrast, in my opinion, to Hamya's contemporaries - is that the narrator continually allows for other perspectives as a corrective to her own outlook. For such a young author, this was really refreshing.

One thing I find a bit grating in much of the work by Hamya's peers is that their novels have Marxist ambitions but these are only depicted via conversations that take place within really elite spheres (eg top universities or the houses of the wealthy creative class). There’s plenty of intellectual engagement but very little action. It’s as if acknowledging privileges and the evils of late capitalism were the end goal, making it a question of personal morality rather than pushing for more equitable structures.

The narrator of THREE ROOMS doesn’t expend the same energy on self-satisfyingly espousing Marxist beliefs while refraining from doing anything about it. She wasn’t really begging for likeability or absolution: she was simply frustrated with the bleak outlook for home ownership, and is always careful to counter this with insights from other characters from different backgrounds, or a different generation. Also - depiction of digital space was so well-executed!

THREE ROOMS for me recalled Rachel Cusk’s OUTLINE trilogy - it struck me as being indebted to those three books in terms of its stylistic ambitions; namely the ways conversations are relayed through a rather reticent narrator. Fans of Cusk's work should mark this as a high priority read when it comes out in June