Three Rooms

''A furious encapsulation of Generation Rent.'' OLIVIA LAING, NEW STATESMAN BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2021

''Cool, sharp and perceptive.'' Stylist

What is the true cost of living as a young person in 21st-century England?

It''s autumn 2018 and a young woman moves into a rented room in university accommodation, ready to begin a job as a research assistant at Oxford. Here, living and working in the spaces that have birthed the country''s leaders, she is both outsider and insider, and she can''t shake the feeling that real life is happening elsewhere.

Eight months later she finds herself in London. She''s landed a temp contract at a society magazine and is paying -80 a week to sleep on a stranger''s sofa. Summer rolls on and England roils with questions around its domestic civil rights: Brexit, Grenfell, climate change, homelessness. Meanwhile, tensions with her flatmate escalate, she is overworked and underpaid, and the prospects of a