You can use your St. Louis County Library card to borrow titles from these partner libraries:
2 of 3 copies available
“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.
-
Creators
-
Publisher
-
Release date
August 13, 2024 -
Formats
-
OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780593868553
- File size: 171988 KB
- Duration: 05:58:18
-
-
Languages
- English
-
Reviews
-
June 3, 2024
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. -
As an audiobook, Hamya's low-key novel might easily have employed two narrators--or even a third. The action revolves around the opening of Sophia's play, which is attended by her father, a novelist who is appalled when he finds himself depicted as a crass philanderer while they were on their vacation together in Italy when Sophia was a teenager. During the performance Sophia is having lunch with her divorced mother, thereby providing an additional point of view. In this subtle narrative Claire Kinson proves a unifying agent, tying together the novel's looser threads and providing a defining voice. That voice is neither silken nor rough, and more art than melody. But Kinson, a charmer, effectively enlivens the novel's sly approach to its two opposing yet oddly similar points of view. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine -
December 6, 2024
A renowned playwright father. A daughter debuting a play of her own. Little does the father know that he is the focus of his daughter's new play and that all of his failings will be put on display for the world to see. As the father sits--quite uncomfortably--and watches his daughter's play, Hamya (Three Rooms) transports listeners back to the time in which the play's events took place, during a father-daughter seaside summer vacation in Sicily. It's there, off the coast of Italy, where the daughter engages with a local boy her age, where the father has several dalliances, and where, ultimately, the two increasingly fail to see eye-to-eye. As the novel comes to an amusing final scene--the father balancing a coffee he was forced to buy in order to use the restroom, while his daughter calls nonstop to discuss what he thought of the play--both daughter and father are forced to examine their hypocrisies up front. Narrator Claire Kinson does an excellent job navigating between time periods and capturing the irony of it all. VERDICT Hamya's timely second novel explores generational gaps in a rapidly changing world.--Whitney Bates-Gomez
Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
-