The Hypocrite - by Jo Hamya (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"Impressive...An intense, onrushing, highly pressurized book, best experienced in a single sitting, like a play." --Wall Street Journal

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.

Review Quotes

Named a Best Book of the Year by TIME, The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, Vanity Fair, Town & Country Magazine, Broadway Direct, and the Brooklyn Public Library

New York Times Book Review September Book Club Pick - Dakota Johnson's TeaTime Pictures September Book Club Pick

One of the Best Books of August from The New York Times and The Week
A Most Anticipated Book from Town and Country, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, and The Millions

"A brilliant litmus test of a novel...What Hamya brings to this modern debacle, besides a precision of language and an aptitude for structure that ought to make her contemporaries quake, is a tenderness you don't see coming."
--The Atlantic

"Sharp and agile...Hamya's staging is savvy; each scene is packed with implication and, often, wit."
--New York Times Book Review

"Impressive...[The Hypocrite's] pleasures are in the swift, agile way that Ms. Hamya flits between the characters' thoughts and the past and present...This is an intense, onrushing, highly pressurized book, best experienced in a single sitting, like a play."
--Wall Street Journal

"Hamya deploys a fluid prose style...What is real, what is imagined, what is performed: In Hamya's confident hands, it all becomes productively confused...When Hamya allows her characters to live, breathe, spit and snarl, her fiction soars."
--Washington Post

"Excellent...I enjoyed the novel hugely...Like Edward St Aubyn and Anne Enright, Hamya is so good on generational conflict, the friction of family, and the damage done by charming but complacent men. But The Hypocrite is a strikingly original book too. I tore through it, shoulders clenched but full of admiration."
--David Nicholls, author of One Day, in Electric Literature

"The Hypocrite is 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

"Hamya's insightful, specific descriptions complicate these familiar types...The Hypocrite ticks out new information through brief, cinematic scenes that, though often spare, remain well tuned to the distinct voices of Sophia and her family throughout...The Hypocrite is wise about art and writing, tender about family and the bewildering march of time, and smart about the ways cultural conflicts touch individual lives. At once ironic and humane, it trades most satisfyingly on tragedies and comedies of self-delusion--the truth that we all have the minority view of ourselves, particularly when it comes to our intentions--and the inevitability that we will get others even more wrong."
--New York Review of Books

"[A] slippery, excellent exploration of sexual politics, creative appropriation, and family dynamics...It's stylish and thoughtful and, as a story so thoroughly interested in perspective, lands its ending with all the force of a sharp knife hurled at a bullseye."
--Vanity Fair

"The Hypocrite features Hamya's astute insights into millennials as she grapples with the generational divide in responding to our post-#MeToo world."
--Town & Country Magazine

"Hamya's complex and nuanced work invites both her characters and readers to ask questions that linger after the play's third act."
--Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"Immaculate...A novel chalk full of wrongdoings, generational feuds, and rude awakenings, The Hypocrite is a story that will stick with you long after you put it down."
--Chicago Review of Books

"In essence, this is a novel about a play about a novel. But really, it's about so much more than that: father-daughter relationships, misogyny, generational differences, feminism, and more. Hamya makes it work."
--Ms. Magazine

"A work critics are dazzled by."
--Broadway Direct

"Witty and devastatingly acute."
--The Guardian

"A smooth and often witty portrait of the upper-middle-class London art scene...The novel is closer in spirit to HBO's The White Lotus...Rather than skewering the careless interlopers, [Hamya] aims for a bit more nuance."
--Foreign Policy

"I was instantly pulled in by the ingenious structure of this novel...All the various strands braid into a fraught, compelling conversation, not just between parents and children, but between generations, and even between modes of art and understanding."
--Lit Hub

"Family dysfunction at its peak in an amazing location. Think 'White Lotus' on steroids."
--BK Reader

"I have rarely underlined so many passages in a book...Hamya's writing is tightly wound, and continually constricting: no one escapes her judgement. There is empathy amid the cool critique...But all the characters are also revealed to have their own hypocrisies, and a powerful sense of self-righteous victimhood...From curtain up, The Hypocrite offers forensic and pitiless insights into an embodied generation gap--everyone believing they're in the right; everyone, of course, still getting things wrong. So who is the hypocrite of the title? Oh, probably all of them."
--iNews

"Lots of writers have tried to tackle the post-MeToo, post-'woke' landscape of interpersonal relationships, but this novel does it with more nuance than most...The Hypocrite elegantly shifts between points of view to reveal the blind spots of both of her characters."
--Maris Kreizman, The Maris Review

"The layered narratives gradually create a collective moral clarity that transcends any individual perspective...I closed the novel with the strange feeling that the characters might have benefited from an experience only accessible to the reader--that of studying each other's scripts on the same page."
--Los Angeles Review of Books

"Acerbic...Hamya writes with real wit. Her descriptions are rich...Since the publication of her debut novel, Three Rooms, her style has rightly been compared to Rachel Cusk's. With this original novel--sensitively observed and artfully paced--she breaks out into something of her own."
--Literary Review

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

"Brilliant. Thrilling and unpredictable, it struck me as a story of misunderstanding and failed connection, told with a dreamy, Sofia Coppola-esque quality. As a portrayal of artistic creation fuelled by bitterness, The Hypocrite uncovers an uncomfortable truth: how a piece of art can both unify and alienate."
--Natasha Brown, author of Assembly

"The Hypocrite is an acid chamber piece that skewers the father, mother and daughter at its heart without denying them their messy, affecting humanity. It's tense, it's painful, it's funny. I loved it."
--Chris Power, author of A Lonely Man

"A darkly comic family drama that keeps us guessing right up to the end...Hamya's prose is crisp and fluid."
--Times Literary Supplement

"The drama of the story's intergenerational strife keeps us rapt on its own terms, but also functions as an even-handed cultural satire targeting social media-powered morality in the 21st century. Written with cool precision as well as barely veiled glee, it confirms Hamya as one of the sharpest new writers around."
--Daily Mail

"The Hypocrite poses the conundrum with wit, tension and unsparing insight into the generational divide. Here, Jo Hamya has written a powerful allegory for the culture wars at large."
--Prospect Magazine

"I loved Jo Hamya's elegantly plotted and wickedly funny The Hypocrite. A perfect and perfectly merciless novel."
--Sarah Bernstein, author of Study for Obedience

"The Hypocrite is engrossing, acerbic and elegantly executed. Jo Hamya artfully reveals her characters' flaws and vulnerabilities with humour, wit and style."
--Lauren Aimee Curtis, author of Dolores

"Jo Hamya writes beautiful sentences, with The Hypocrite showing off such impeccable descriptions as, 'on a small white boat that rocked like a bell towards a catalogue of blistered cliff faces.' The Hypocrite also asks excellent questions about race and class...These gems illuminate the plot, which moves between the present and the past with ease...The Hypocrite offers much to think about regarding being a writer, creating worlds from memory and imagination, and how that affects all parties potentially involved...At its heart, though, this is a novel about familiar and familial pain, the hurts those closest can inflict, even when the harm is unintended or goes completely unnoticed. And it packs a punch, despite its small size. Hamya certainly calls into question the version of masculinity performed by Sophia's father, but she doesn't completely negate him, rendering his embarrassment and confusion beautifully...Impeccable."
--Shelf Awareness

"This is a book that tells so much about power and imperialism even though it's just about three members of a family...Hamya is incredible. She's a writer to watch."
--Bethannne Patrick, "Keen On" podcast

"Taut, poised."
--The Bookseller, Editors' Choice

"Gender roles, generation gaps, the nature of genius: Hamya explores big ideas but is at her best offering precise observations...A biting novel of art, inheritance, and evolving mores."
--Kirkus

"Provocative... None of the characters escape Hamya's bemused and excoriating view, nor are there any easy answers to the questions raised about expressions of gender and privilege in art. Fans of Anne Enright's The Wren, the Wren ought to take note."
--Publishers Weekly

About the Author