"What had a rented room in Oxford and a sofa in London made me?" asks the narrator of Jo Hamya's short, subtle, yet unnerving debut novel, Three Rooms, in which an unnamed woman of color attempts to eke out a writing career but cannot afford to put down roots. Starting as a research assistant in Oxford, where she rents a small apartment in a historic building, she attempts to ward off the feeling that she belongs nowhere, that she possesses nothing. That feeling only hardens and deepens into bitter reality when she moves on to work at a society magazine, in which her shallow copyediting role hardly makes up for the sofa she's sleeping on in a stranger's flat. She wants to be intellectual, to be political, but she finds herself regurgitating the hot takes she reads online and obsessing over a younger white woman's Instagram presence--in particular, the way this woman can mold herself to whatever environment she happens to be in, as if it takes her no effort to lay claim to a space. Of course, it doesn't take her any effort. She has been given the tools in life to belong.
Three Rooms is clever enough not to make any vast moral indictments, nor does it spoon-feed readers by telling them what conclusions to make from its generally upsetting premise. No character avoids Hamya's ire, least of all the narrator herself. But Hamya layers in enough social and political context to conjure an ever-present, unsettling buzz under the audience's skin. This is not an easy, enjoyable novel, though it is a brilliant one, which is, of course, precisely the point. --Lauren Puckett, freelance writer