Hypocrite

The long summer of 2010 was spent with her father in Sicily. With a tight deadline for his new novel, the successful writer barely (if at all) accompanied his daughter on trips to the beach or outings, and kept her indoors for endless hours, forcing her to type what he dictated. The promised holiday programme for two (after her parents' divorce) was reduced to Sophia's solitude on rare outings and beach trips, and led her to learn about facts of life for which she was not yet old enough – either through the content of her secretarial work or, late at night, when she heard her father having sex with various unknown women he picked up in the seaside town's nightclubs.
It is now the summer of 2020, in London. Sophia is a young playwright with her new play on stage. The reviews have been exceptional, but her father, the famous author whose novels have aged badly, has avoided reading them. However, he eventually goes to see the play, unaware that it centres on the holidays they had spent together in Sicily.
While awaiting her father's verdict, Sophia has lunch with her mother, discussing and dissecting family relationships – her mother, slightly intoxicated; Sophia, deeply distressed.
With magnificent linguistic precision and "seamless" changes of space and time, Jo Hamya fits the narrative into the duration of just one performance of the play, revealing the anger between a father and daughter, the difficult inheritances each generation has to manage, and the difficulty of cultivating empathy in a world that changes at lightning speed. An extremely intelligent, sometimes comical, and unexpectedly tender novel.


"Comically caustic."
The Independent

"A comic and dark family drama. Hamya's prose crackles and flows."
Times Literary Supplement

"Ingenious novel. The various threads weave a tense and engaging conversation, not only between parents and children, but between generations and even between ways of making art and ways of understanding."
Literary Hub

Work Details:

• Author: Jo Hamya
• Publisher: Quetzal
• Number of Pages: 240