Granta pre-empts poet Pester's 'unforgettably precise' debut novel  

Granta Books has snapped up The Lodgers, the debut novel from acclaimed poet Holly Pester, in a pre-emptive deal. 

Editorial director Anne Meadows and poetry editor Rachael Allen made the bid jointly, acquiring rights from Caitlin Leydon at Curtis Brown.

"A nameless narrator returns to her home town to be near her complex, larger-than-life mother," the synopsis states. "A sub-letter in a ghostly flat, she spends her days imagining the life of the new tenant in the house she’s left behind; a young, single woman who finds herself entangled with her landlady’s family. As she imagines the other woman’s joys and errors, a portrait of her own youth emerges, and the two women form a kind of adjacent intimacy. In unforgettably precise, deeply political, generous prose, The Lodgers speaks to what it means to live in a space you do not own."

Meadows said: "Who can afford to dwell and who is made to wander are burning political questions. I fell in love with the two women at the centre of The Lodgers, both of them trying to get by in an economic reality that has no room for them. Holly writes their lives with grace and humour. She’s the real thing: a stylist whose every word carries weight and power, who is doing something in prose that is entirely its own. I am so glad that Granta will continue to be her home."

Pester’s first 2021 collection, Comic Timing (Granta), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Poetry and was selected by the TLS and the White Review as a Book of the Year. She has worked in sound art and performance, with original dramatic work on BBC Radio 4 and collaborations with the Serpentine Galleries, Women’s Art Library and Wellcome Collection. Her poetry has been published extensively, appearing in Poetry Review, the White Review and Poetry London among other publications. 

"The Lodgers is a book about motherhood and housing and being in a painful connection to both," Pester said. "I am thrilled to work with Granta again after the collaborative and loving process of developing Comic Timing. Granta is home to incredible writers who experiment carefully, mischievously and boldly with prose and ideas. It’s a perfect match."

Allen added: "The Lodgers speaks truth to precarity in a way that will make many feel less alone. It gives a recognisable theatre of contemporary players—those who we lodge with, those who pass us by, those we are in debt to, those who we sleep with, those who we love, those who are difficult to love. It is an experimental hymn to the precariously housed—the daily usualness of striving, moving through, keeping on, all in Holly’s completely inimitable song-like prose."