The Hypocrite

What happens when we stop idolising the generations above us? Stop idolising our own parents?

What happens when we become frightened of the generations below us? Frightened of our own children?

The Aeolian islands, 2010. Sophia, on the cusp of adulthood, spends a long hot summer with her father in Sicily. There she falls in love for the first time. There she works as her father's amanuensis, typing the novel he dictates, a story about sex and gender divides. There, their relationship fractures.

London, Summer 2020. Sophia's father, a 61-year-old novelist who does not feel himself to be a bad or outdated person sits in a large theatre, surrounded by strangers, watching his daughter's first play. A play that takes that Sicilian holiday is its subject. A play that will force him to watch his purported crimes play out in front of him.

I thought The Hypocrite was brilliant. Thrilling and unpredictable, as a story of misunderstanding and failed connection, told with a dreamy, Sofia Coppola-esque quality. As a portrayal of artistic creation fuelled by bitterness, The Hypocrite uncovers an uncomfortable truth: how a piece of art can both unify and alienate -- Natasha Brown, author of ASSEMBLY
Sharp, witty and astute about parents and children, but never cruel; I enjoyed it hugely -- David Nicholls, ONE DAY
The Hypocrite is an acid chamber piece that skewers the father, mother and daughter at its heart without denying them their messy, affecting humanity. It's tense, it's painful, it's funny. I loved it -- Chris Power, author of A LONELY MAN
I loved Jo Hamya's elegantly plotted and wickedly funny The Hypocrite. A perfect and perfectly merciless novel -- Sarah Bernstein, author of the Booker-shortlisted STUDY FOR OBEDIENCE
Hamya writes with real wit. Her style has rightly been compared to Rachel Cusk's. With this original novel - sensitively observed and artfully paced - she breaks out into something of her own -- Lucy Thynne LITERARY REVIEW

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
I relished the original emotional pulse of The Hypocrite, a compulsive tale of a reckoning with memory and responsibility played out in real time -- Laura Bailey
[A] clever study of art, dysfunction and generational difference . . . a well-wrought and very clever book -- Sarah Moss GUARDIAN
Ingenious . . . all the various strands braid into a fraught, compelling conversation, not just between parents and children, but between generations, and even between modes of art and understanding LITHUB
An astute, funny-sad analysis of power, perception and memory that questions the value of art and the responsibilities - and egos - of those who make it -- Catherine Jarvie MARIE CLAIRE
A taut, poised portrait of a father-daughter relationship and the attitudinal clash between generations -- Madeleine Feeny THE BOOKSELLER, Editor's Choice
Caustically funny -- Martin Chilton THE INDEPENDENT
The Hypocrite is engrossing, acerbic and elegantly executed. Jo Hamya artfully reveals her characters' flaws and vulnerabilities with humour, wit and style -- Lauren Aimee Curtis, author of STRANGERS AT THE PORT
The Hypocrite is a brooding, taut novel -- Anna Bonet I PAPER
An even-handed cultural satire targeting social media-powered morality in the twenty-first century. Written with cool precision as well as barely veiled glee, it confirms Hamya as one of the sharpest new writers around. -- Anthony Cummins DAILY MAIL
A sharp, insightful read -- Jo Finney GOOD HOUSEKEEPING
The plot moves with a smooth economy, brilliantly satirising all kinds of pretension, while offering psychological insights -- Tom Payne THE MAIL ON SUNDAY
A darkly comic family drama that keeps us guessing right up to the end . . . Hamya's prose is crisp and fluid -- Susie Mesure TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
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 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A funny, painful and poignant picture, looking at the subjective natures of memory and writing and the humiliation of being observed. -- Nathalie Kernot GQ
Sharp and agile...Hamya's staging is savvy; each scene is packed with implication and, often, wit NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
Hamya deploys a fluid prose style . . . What is real, what is imagined, what is performed: In Hamya's confident hands, it all becomes productively confused . . . When Hamya allows her characters to live, breathe, spit and snarl, her fiction soars WASHINGTON POST
An intense, onrushing, highly pressurized book, best experienced in a single sitting, like a play WALL STREET JOURNAL
The layered narratives gradually create a collective moral clarity that transcends any individual perspective...I closed the novel with the strange feeling that the characters might have benefited from an experience only accessible to the reader - that of studying each other's scripts on the same page LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS

Jo Hamya was born in London, in 1997. She is the author of Three Rooms and has written for The New York Times, the Financial Times, and the Fence, among others. Currently, she works as an in house writer and archivist for the Booker Prizes and its authors. She is also the recipient of a Harold Moody doctoral studentship at King's College London, where her research focuses around building on 20th century western literary sociology and critique to create a viable school of literary criticism for a 21st century digitised landscape.

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