GUNK

Two English women—a self-sufficient nightclub manager and a teenage bartender—become bound by pregnancy and struggle to find a place in each other’s lives.

Jules is in her 30s and still running Gunk, the Brighton nightclub owned by her sleazy ex-husband, Leon. After watching him sleep with students again and again during and after their marriage, she warns the club’s new hire, 18-year-old Nim, to stay away from him. But Nim, who has a way “of leaning into an impulse, then following it through to the end,” hooks up with him anyway. A condom breaks, the morning-after pill fails, and she ends up pregnant with the baby Jules always wanted but never got. As a narrator, Jules is distant, the whole novel falling into a retrospective tone that’s rarely disrupted. Even her most intense motivation, the desire to have a child, is passive; she never explicitly tries to have one, never visits a fertility clinic, never commits to IVF or adoption. As a character, her motivations are sometimes obscure: It’s hard to imagine what she ever saw in Leon. That said, Sams shines in the details, never shying away from the unsavory, gunky side of life. She also paints a compelling picture of Nim: her shaved head, her tracksuits, and the quirky personality that drives her to give pebbles to Jules and her parents at Christmas. Perhaps the greatest strength of the novel is the questions it asks about family and relationships, filtered through Jules and her doubt: “I was determined to think of myself as above other people. Was this why I wanted a baby? Was this why other people kept on having babies?…We wanted a chance to build a destiny, from day one.”

A vivid, reflective exploration of parenthood, personhood, and desire.