Jo Hamya’s debut novel, Three Rooms, was a state-of-the-nation polemic about “generation rent” that saw her likened to Virginia Woolf and Deborah Levy. Her second, The Hypocrite, is powered by a sustained conflict between Sophia, a young playwright, and her father, a famous author. Witty and devastatingly acute, it shifts between a Sicilian summer 10 years ago, when a rift opened up between them as she typed up his novel on sex and gender, and present-day London, where he’s watching the play she’s written about that same holiday. Hamya, 26, also co-hosts the Booker prize podcast and is midway through a PhD on literary criticism in the 21st-century’s digitised landscape.
Second books can be notoriously difficult, especially after a well-received debut. Did you find it so?
It got difficult the moment readers came into my mind. I got some great advice from Ben Okri at that stage. He told me just to find joy in it and have fun, and to not think of it as a second novel, to think of it as something you can work at and do better on. I think it’s very possible that I won’t really hit my stride for another couple of books.
