The Lodgers by Holly Pester review – the suboptimal life of a subletter | Fiction
The British poet and academic Holly Pester’s debut novel is about how easy it is to lose yourself when you don’t have a place to truly call home. In The Lodgers, an unnamed narrator returns to a town where she has arranged to sublet a flat. It’s less than ideal: the living room is “an absurdly awkward corner shape” and the whole place smells of “men’s shower gel and repeated nights of instant noodles”. The woman has chosen this flat because it overlooks her mother’s house, though her mother, whom she calls Moffa, is…