Holly Pester, a poet whose 2021 debut Comic Timing was shortlisted for the Forward best first collection prize, cut her teeth at open mic nights and has, as a result, a keen interest in the difference between delivery and performance. Both are essential, she says, “whether it’s at a poetry reading or on the page”. They might be considered synonymous, she told Frieze magazine in a 2021 interview, “but I like to remember that the text is always there, it’s like a score, a contract.” No surprise, then, that The Lodgers, her fiction debut, performs so well on the page – it’s a poet’s novel.
“As a bored and nervous young girl,” Pester’s unnamed and disorganised narrator relates, “I often imagined myself climbing inside a small case or container, like…
