The British poet and academic Holly Pester’s debut novel is about how easy it is to lose yourself when you don’t have a place to truly call home. In The Lodgers, an unnamed narrator returns to a town where she has arranged to sublet a flat. It’s less than ideal: the living room is “an absurdly awkward corner shape” and the whole place smells of “men’s shower gel and repeated nights of instant noodles”. The woman has chosen this flat because it overlooks her mother’s house, though her mother, whom she calls Moffa, is absent when she goes to check in on her. Another person who should be around but isn’t is Kav, the narrator’s flatmate. She grows anxious, though Pester’s first-person prose remains crisp and playful despite her escalating unease. “I hadn’t managed to sleep much at all in my new bed,” she writes, “and my instincts were goosey.”
This strangeness is doubled in the narrator’s recollections of her previous sublet, in another town. These sections are written in the second person, as the narrator recalls her time in this house by addressing the current tenant, whom she imagines is now acting just as she once did.
There she stayed with a single mother and her daughter, in a room that she agreed to leave empty between 9am and 6pm, during which time the mother would unfold a table and take beauty clients. At first, the woman’s relationship with her live-in landlord was convivial. The pair shared gossip and late-night wine. Then something shifted. This friendship was false, its parties unequal.
Pester’s protagonist is restless. Her mind is always whirring, which makes for a disorienting read. But how, this novel asks, could she be any different? To lodge, the narrator thinks to herself, is to “adapt and hide my needs rather than dig down, simply hover without much substance, meekly occupy”. To sublet – and to stay in any kind of precarious housing – is to not live totally as oneself. This stylistically eccentric novel holds a pressing, political truth.
Ellen Peirson-Hagger is assistant culture editor at the New Statesman
The Lodgers by Holly Pester is published by Granta (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
