The Hypocrite by Jo Hamya (HC)

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.

REVIEWS

"Impressive...[The Hypocrite's] pleasures are in the swift, agile way that Ms. Hamya flits between the characters’ thoughts and the past and present...This is an intense, onrushing, highly pressurized book, best experienced in a single sitting, like a play." 
—Wall Street Journal

“Hamya deploys a fluid prose style…What is real, what is imagined, what is performed: In Hamya’s confident hands, it all becomes productively confused…When Hamya allows her characters to live, breathe, spit and snarl, her fiction soars.”
—Washington Post

"Excellent...I enjoyed the novel hugely...Like Edward St Aubyn and Anne Enright, Hamya is so good on generational conflict, the friction of family, and the damage done by charming but complacent men. But The Hypocrite is a strikingly original book too. I tore through it, shoulders clenched but full of admiration."
—David Nicholls, author of One Day, in Electric Literature

PRODUCT DETAILS
Hardcover Edition
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN:  978-0593701034
Pages: 240