Every month a group of willing and hungry readers gather to discuss a new book, have a nice chat and practice their English. New members are welcome!

This month's book of choice is The Hypocrite by Jo Hamya (2024).

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.

Joyce Hamya (born 1997) is a British novelist from East London, born to a Polish mother and a Ugandan father. She graduated from King’s College London and University of Oxford. Hamya began her career as a copy editor for Tatler and a bookseller at Waterstones and she also contributed to the Financial Times and The British Blacklist. Her debut novel, published in 2021, is Three Rooms. In 2023, it was announced Weidenfeld & Nicolson has acquired the rights to publish Hamya's second novel The Hypocrite in 2024, which she described as "born out of questions the pandemic and my first novel left behind". The novel was shortlisted at the 2024 Nero Book Awards and won a 2025 Somerset Maugham Award. Hamya co-hosts the Booker Prize Podcast with James Walton.