Saba Sams's thoughtful and provocative debut novel offers an intimate look at motherhood through the complex, unusual relationship between two women. Jules, the novel's narrator, manages Gunk, a divey nightclub in Brighton, U.K. Gunk is owned by Leon, Jules's womanizing, wastrel ex-husband with whom she maintains a strained, barely civil relationship. Jules's life changes dramatically when Leon hires Nim, an enigmatic, self-possessed 18-year-old with a shaved head and a chip on her shoulder. The two women form an unlikely and undefinable friendship that is tested when Nim sleeps with Leon and their tryst results in a pregnancy. Jules, unable to conceive but longing to be a mother, feels betrayed by Nim, and a coolness develops between them until Nim tells Jules that she wants to give her the baby to raise.
Though slim, Gunk provides an extraordinarily deep and layered examination of motherhood and the ways the different women in the novel approach it, including Jules's intense yearning and Nim's indifference, and how the idea of what makes a family can be fluid. "Despite the strain of pregnancy, the agony of birth, despite the terror of unknowable love," Jules muses, "we wanted so badly to see ourselves in somebody else, and we wanted to have control over that person." Sams's sinewy yet economical prose elevates the novel, and her descriptions of labor and delivery are breathtakingly sensual: "Nim's entire sense of self had evaporated from her, and was now the condensation dripping from the big windows." This jewel box of a novel is a memorable debut from a writer to watch. --Debra Ginsberg, author and freelance editor