Anyone who has lived in a house share will know the feeling of having to creep around your own home as though you aren’t really supposed to be there – the endless micro negotiations, real and imagined, that characterise living situations that are governed by necessity rather than choice.
That sense of unease, the uncanny feeling of being a ghost haunting the edges of your own life, is brilliantly captured by Holly Pester in her new novel, The Lodgers. The book follows a woman returning to her home town, who, while renting a room overlooking her mother’s house, spends her time imagining the lodger who replaced her at her last temporary dwelling. When she arrives at the flat she has sublet, “compact and hot and, like a lot of short-term adult accommodation, kitted out by small acts of shopping for low-cost utensils”, she is struck by its similarity to the packaging for the sandwich she has just eaten. “The triangular box was empty, with an inside that resembled, like sarcasm, the one I was in … It had a window too.”
