The Lodgers

Pester, primarily known as a poet, brings that background directly into her debut novel's form: a narrator moving between a current sublet and memories of a previous tenancy, with time and place blurring rather than resolving into clean chronology. Critics read this disorientation as the point rather than a flaw, since the book's real subject is the psychological toll of housing precarity—the way renting forces people, especially single women and mothers, to make themselves small and provisional, never quite settling because they can't. Reviewers praised how the prose enacts that instability formally, with abrupt shifts and a slightly surreal register.