The Hypocrite

As Sophia’s father settles into his seat to watch a performance of the play his daughter has written, he doesn’t know what to expect; determined to give her an honest evaluation, he has refused to read summaries or reviews. What unfolds before him are three acts faithfully reconstructing a disastrous holiday the two of them took in the Aeolian Islands 13 years earlier, when Sophia was 17. After her parents’ divorce, Sophia spent most of her time with her mother, but the trip allowed her to reconnect with her father, a well-known novelist, and help him with his current book. In Sophia’s mind, the vacation represented everything wrong with her father as a person. While her father sits in the theater and watches himself impersonated by an actor, Sophia eats lunch with her mother and lays bare their family’s dysfunction. Though Sophia doesn’t want to turn into her father, the comparisons between them are inescapable. Set in London in 2020 during the pandemic, Hamya’s (Three Rooms) novel provides a detailed analysis of isolation, claustrophobia, and inheritance.