Widespread acclaim for researcher’s debut novel

A debut novel, written by Essex poet and researcher Dr Holly Pester, has received rave reviews and been showcased on BBC Radio 4’s Open Book.

The Lodgers, which follows a woman living in a precarious sub-let as she keeps an eye on her wayward mother, has been described as a darkly comic novel [that] brings wit and invention to a story of rented rooms” by The Guardian and “pleasingly weird” by the Times Literary Supplement.

Now featured by Open Book, it’s also been widely praised by other authors. AK Blakemore has applauded the “tang and pith in every sentence” and Nathalie Olah said: “There is no one better than Holly Pester at communicating the eerie, sometimes hilarious and often hallucinatory experience of modern precarity.”

Dr Pester, whose practice-as-research drew on her research into contemporary tenancy and housing precarity, as well as her own experiences as a lodger and the child of a single mother who had lodgers in writing the book. As well as studying women’s fiction and experimental novels in preparation, she also took inspiration from her work as a successful poet.

The result has been described by The Observer as a “stylistically eccentric novel [that] holds a pressing, political truth.”

She says she’s surprised, but pleased, by the reaction: “I am delighted that people are accepting and excited by its unusual form and style.

“People have described it as funny yet unsettling. I am pleased with that, because the idea is about the inability to be settled.

“A lot of people clearly feel unsettled in themselves and can connect to the themes of precarious housing, to estranged familial and mother-daughter relationships, a lack of agency in generation rent.”

Read our full interview with Dr Pester and hear her discuss the book on BBC Radio 4’s Open Book.

Header picture courtesy of Eleanor Vonne Brown.