Cafés
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Fitzcarraldo Editions
Publishing:2nd Jul '26
£12.99
This title is due to be published on 2nd July, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Welcome to Cafés! A dream scene to study in. A place to perform at an open mic. A limited paradise with overheads. Where we can eat sausage cassoulet and not think about work. Where we can meet friends and not think about love. Where we can meet lovers and be too nervous to eat.
In Holly Pester’s unique lyric, the café space is rendered as a fantastical structure through which to explore pressurised subjectivities in the shape of a worker, a lover, a friend, an artist, and a researcher.
At a time when conversations around the decline of the commons and third spaces are heightened, Holly’s book is a stylish and political intervention and call for the necessity of a place for eccentrics, poets, employees and those taking steps towards the rest of their life.
‘Holly Pester makes the world sing. The song is written by Victoria Wood, and it's a happy-sad song about utopia. Figured not as a distant place but as a way of being with people and things, that might also be called friendship, that might also be called poetry. She reminds us that poetry is a social activity, an expression of faith in the possibility of connection – with other people, with the world, with happiness – that feels, in our historical moment, like a form of resistance.’
― Ben Eastham, author of The Floating World
‘Holly Pester is a genius and The Lodgers gets into everything that matters.’
― Kate Briggs, author of The Long Form (praise for The Lodgers)
‘There is no one better than Holly Pester at communicating the eerie, sometimes hilarious and often hallucinatory experience of modern precarity. This is a novel for the age and for generation rent: a captivating and unforgettable account of how economic circumstance can lead to a feeling of being only half alive.’
― Nathalie Olah, author of Bad Taste (praise for The Lodgers)
‘With tang and pith in every sentence, The Lodgers speaks to a generational epidemic of rootlessness and porous selfhood with vital wit and utter originality.’
― AK Blakemore, author of The Glutton (praise for The Lodgers)
‘A sad strange lyrical story of shame and displacement but whose strength will not let you go.’
― Sheena Patel, author of I'm a Fan (praise for The Lodgers)
ISBN: 9781804272022
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
112 pages