The Hypocrite

From a fiercely talented writer poised to be a new generation's Rachel Cusk or Deborah Levy, a novel set between the London stage and Sicily, about a daughter who turns her novelist father's fall from grace into a play, and a father who increasingly fears his precocious daughter's voice.

"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.

Author: Jo Hamya
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 08/12/2025
Pages: 240
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.35lbs
Size: 7.90h x 5.20w x 0.60d
ISBN13: 9780593686263
ISBN10: 0593686268
BISAC Categories:
- Fiction | Literary
- Fiction | Psychological
- Fiction | Family Life | General

About the Author
JO HAMYA is the author of Three Rooms and has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, and the Financial Times, among others. Currently, she is a PhD candidate at King's College London.