The Hypocrite

From a fiercely talented writer poised to be a new generation’s Rachel Cusk or Deborah Levy, a novel set between the London stage and Sicily, about a daughter who turns her novelist father’s fall from grace into a play, and a father who increasingly fears his precocious daughter’s voice.

＂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 and Entitlement

＂Sharp, witty and astute about parents and children, but never cruel; I enjoyed it hugely.＂ --David Nicholls, author of One Day and You Are Here

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.

JO HAMYA is the author of Three Rooms and has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, and the Financial Times, among others. Currently, she works as an in-house writer and archivist for the Booker Prizes and its authors and is a PhD candidate at King’s College London.