Latest news with #Gunk
Irish Independent
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Gunk by Saba Sams: nightclub boss left holding the baby after ex-husband's one-night stand
Author lives up to the hype in debut novel Gunk, with a portrayal of parenthood that is both smart and fresh Today at 21:30 The publishing world loves and thrives on fresh blood, and was especially exhilarated when Saba Spiral Sams, then 25, released Send Nudes, a coolly deadpan collection of 10 short stories. The slim but punchy collection, published in 2022, featured plenty of knockout one-liners, and covered all kinds of Gen Z preoccupations, from Tinder dating and selfies to miscarriage and shapewear. It marked Sams, who became a mother at 22, as a writer of considerable humanity, and one with plenty to say. With a place on Granta's Best of Young British Novelists in 2023, Sam's debut novel, if and when it appeared, was destined to make a splash.
The Guardian
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Gunk by Saba Sams review – boozy nights and baby love
To be selected for Granta's Best of Young British Novelists list two years before your debut novel comes out must bring a certain amount of pressure. Saba Sams had already been named a rising star for her short-story collection, Send Nudes; one of the stories, Blue 4eva, won the 2022 BBC National short story award. Now comes Gunk, titled for the grotty student nightclub managed by the thirtysomething protagonist, Jules. The fried egg on the cover hints at a sleazy edge: expect hangover breakfasts with a dawn chorus soundtrack. It's also a playful nod to more tender themes of fertility panic, unplanned pregnancy and young motherhood. At the heart of Gunk is a not-quite-love-not-quite-triangle between Jules, her feckless ex-husband Leon, nightclub owner and irredeemable waster, and the young, mysterious nim – that lower case 'n' is all part of her vibe. Nim arrives one night at the club and captivates both Jules and Leon with her shaved head, her alluring mouth ('big and wet and laughing'), and the sense that she's on the run from her old life. Much of the novel is told through flashback. Before we encounter nim at the club, we know that she has had a baby, left him with Jules, and vanished. Jules is alone trying to comfort a newborn that 'knew by smell, by taste, that I was not his mother'. The main narrative consists of Jules telling us how this state of affairs came to pass. The summary of Jules's and Leon's relationship is characteristically wry. Failed DJ Leon is your quintessential booze-addled fuckboy, past his prime, charismatic but chronically unfaithful. Whenever he takes cocaine, he tells the student girls about the hole in his heart, diagnosed as a baby. 'But it still works and everything?' one of them asks Jules. 'I'd shrugged a shoulder. By that point, Leon and I had been married four years. Debatable, I'd said.' Lines like this are a reminder of the humour and freshness that made Send Nudes so entertaining and insightful. Sams's vivid descriptions of Gunk, a dingy club that stinks of skunk and bubblegum vape and has portable toilets in the smoking area, will spark powerful memories in anyone who has worked in late-night hospitality. What a pleasure, also, to read about characters who aren't burdened by the weight of their own educations. Sams knows that the people with the best stories are the barmaids, the bouncers and the dish pigs, not the privileged students who patronise the club. 'She hadn't learned to pontificate, to babble,' Jules says of nim. 'That was what all these kids really studied at university, I was sure: how to sound smart, whether or not they actually were.' Indeed, Sams's choice of setting brought to mind another writer who started young, Gwendoline Riley, whose 2002 debut, Cold Water, centred around a Manchester dive bar. Sams shares that picaresque interest in the transient world of barmaids and the barflies that buzz around them, and some of Riley's dry humour. 'I always thought this was extreme behaviour, vaguely American,' Jules remarks of the fact that Leon's mother sends him a hamper every Christmas. Of Brighton: 'We could have been in Paris, if it wasn't for all the Tescos.' Sams's novel is a plottier, more commercial endeavour, however. It lacks the strangeness and some of the humour of Send Nudes, and at times the characterisation feels too reminiscent of short fiction. I found myself wanting a more intimate (dare I say novelistic) exploration of Jules's maternal longing. There's nothing wrong with telling rather than showing – some of the most interesting authors are tellers – but being given most of Jules's and Leon's marriage as backstory means that we lose a certain viscerality in that retelling. We know Jules desperately wants a baby, but we don't quite feel it with her. Saying that, Jules's reticence, her unwillingness to allow herself to need anyone, is vital to her character arc, and I don't doubt that Sams knew what she was doing. She's a skilled writer, sometimes a sublime one, as when, for example, she describes nim's unborn baby kicking: 'a sliding, continuous hardness that came once and then again, muscular as an eel beneath the skin'. The way she relates labour, birth and newborns ('a blue squirm, soaking wet') is a mark of her talent and will make you forgive her occasional lapse into cliche. At the heart of Gunk is a profound message about the insufficiency of the nuclear family, and a suggestion of possible alternatives. It's a radical thought, one that Sams is well placed to articulate, and she does so with tenderness. I am certain that with room to experiment, if she leans into her instinct for the eccentric and the uncomfortable, there will be much more acclaim to come. Gunk by Saba Sams is published by Bloomsbury (£16.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
Daily Mail
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
'Heart-rending and compulsive': The new Literary Fiction you need to read - GUNK by Saba Sams, THE NAMES by Florence Knapp, STEALING DAD by Sofka Zinovieff
GUNK by Saba Sams (Bloomsbury Circus £16.99, 240pp) Sams's debut story collection, Send Nudes, earned its then 26-year-old author a spot on Granta's Best of Young British Novelists list in 2023, so it's gratifying that this, her sensitive first novel, delivers. Gunk is the grungy Brighton nightclub where Jules works. She's divorced from its man-child proprietor, Leon, but at 20-something longs for a baby. Which is where 19-year-old bartender Nim comes in. The two are soon friends, and when Nim falls pregnant after a night with Leon, the equation seems obvious: she will just give the child over to Jules. But, as we know from a frame narrative, things don't go to plan. The plots unfolds with a simple inevitability that almost disguises Sams's craft, although there's no missing the brilliance of her scintillating turns of phrase. Imbued with an affecting authenticity of feeling, this is an involving exploration of life, love and family forged beyond labels by one of Gen Z's sharpest observers. THE NAMES by Florence Knapp (Phoenix £16.99, 352pp) The Names is available now from the Mail Bookshop Publishers scrambled to sign up this debut – which also sparked huge auctions internationally – and it certainly boasts an attention-grabbing conceit. In 1987, Cora goes to register her son's name: Gordon, like his father and grandfather before him. But Cora's seemingly kindly GP husband is in fact a violent abuser. Unwilling to saddle her son with such baggage, Cora weighs whether to risk rebelling. What follows are three different narratives: one in which the child does indeed become Gordon; one in which he is christened Bear by his loving sister and one wherein Cora's preferred name, Julian, wins out. With the Life After Life-style narrative proceeding in seven-year leaps, it's a pretext to explore how the lives of the trio play out in the long shadow of terrible trauma. Knapp doesn't shy from emotional gut-punches, but her heart-rending and compulsive tale is ultimately life-affirming. STEALING DAD by Sofka Zinovieff (Corsair £20, 304pp) By the time 70-something Greek artist Alekos dies in London, he's accumulated seven children. But plans for a big family funeral are thwarted by his sixth and final wife, who insists on being the only mourner. Outraged, the far-flung siblings come together and – in the wake of an enlightening micro-dosing session – decide to steal their dad's body and drive him to Scotland for a suitably theatrical send-off. This is the loosest of quest narratives, the free-wheeling style and roving point of view fitting as the clan search for a shape for their grief. I often felt like a bystander as the characters poured over their fractured past, but, if the stakes never felt particularly high, the warmth and sympathy between the bereaved radiates out to the reader.
The Guardian
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Writer Saba Sams: ‘I wanted it to be sexy and really messy'
Saba Sams was in bed breastfeeding her two-month-old baby Sonny when she received an email saying that the publisher Bloomsbury wanted to offer her a book deal on the basis of some of her short stories. She was just 22 at the time. 'I didn't even think it was a book,' she says when we meet. 'I was just learning how to write.' Send Nudes, her first collection, about being a young woman in a messed-up world, was published in 2022. She won the BBC national short story award and the Edge Hill short story prize. The following year, she made the once-in-a-decade Granta Best of Young British Novelists list. 'Then I was like: 'Oh, this is actually happening. This feels like a big deal,'' she says. It is one of the first warm spring days and we are sitting outside a cafe in Broadway Market in east London. Sams, now 28, has another new baby (three months old). He is being looked after by her grandmother, along with her toddler, at her flat in nearby Bethnal Green, while her eldest, who is just about to turn six, is at school. She also – somehow – has her first novel, Gunk, out next month. Squinting against the sunshine, she seems remarkably unfazed by it all. And, as a writer of youthful malaise, very cheerful. Although she does admit that it is a 'relief' to have the tricky follow-up to a hit debut in the bag. 'You write the first book and you're like: 'Well, that will probably never happen again,'' she says. 'I feel like a real writer now.' Sams writes in the disarming voice of a bored teenager with a gift for one-liners and sudden moments of poetry, and it is not hard to see why her work has caused such a stir. The 10 short stories in Send Nudes show characters on the heady precipice between girlhood and becoming young women. 'It was the summer between year nine and 10, when all the boys smelt of Lynx Africa and Subway,' one narrator tells us. Pool-side rivalries flare on a first blended-family holiday; a young woman bakes sourdough in the days after an abortion; a girl attempts to recreate a Tenerife beach in a London high-rise flat to console her mother during the pandemic – these stories are sad, true and very now. The girls' world is one of Tinder and Snapchat, but also age-old problems of unwanted pregnancies and abuse. They navigate toxic relationships with their friends, boyfriends, parents and their own bodies in stories that are sticky with booze, sex and blood. Gunk returns to the same territory. The title is the name of the grotty student club in the novel, which is set in Sams's home city of Brighton, and also refers to the slime on a baby's head after it's born. It opens with a baby just '24 hours and 17 minutes' old and loops back to end with what Sams calls her 'big fat birth scene'. In between, the novel charts the friendship between Jules, the divorced manager of Gunk, and nim, a shaven-headed 18-year-old who comes to work in the club. In a twist on the standard love triangle, Jules's ex-husband Leon is the father of nim's baby, and the novel rests on the ambiguous relationship between the two women. In Sams's fictional worlds, the edges between female friendship and desire are as smudged as lipstick after a long night partying. Jules and nim are everything to each other, she explains. 'They're a boss and an employee, a kind of mother and daughter interchangeably, they've slept with the same man and they are parents of the same child.' Like the unequal best friends in her short story Snakebite, their relationship is charged with attraction. 'I wanted it to be sexy,' she says. 'I wanted to keep it really messy and to see if there weren't so many rules around love, maybe we could love each other better.' Sams is interested in the tangled and untidy: 'I couldn't write something neat because it wouldn't feel true to me.' Her own life became messy when she got pregnant just after graduating from the University of Manchester with a degree in English and creative writing. 'I was a woman of a certain class and education; I was expected to dream of something other than wasting my life on a baby,' she wrote in an essay in Granta magazine shortly after Send Nudes was published. She realised she desperately wanted to keep the baby. Her boyfriend Jacob wasn't initially keen (he's now a very happy father of three boys). 'It didn't occur to me that I would feel completely alone afterwards,' she says today. She felt alienated from her friends and the older mums she met in west London, where she was living at the time. Writing the stories was a form of escape, but also 'a kind of grieving process for girlhood,' she says. 'I really felt like I had left young womanhood behind.' Gunk was written when Sonny was a toddler and she was pregnant with her second baby. She knew she had to write about young motherhood, and that inevitably meant writing about alternative families. In a time of a cost of living crisis and crazy childcare fees, she feels 'like everyone's rethinking how the family looks. Everyone is like: 'Where's the village? We need the village.' It's just not working.' It is not just domestic set-ups that have changed. 'You no longer need a man and woman to have a baby,' she says. In Gunk she wanted to think about all the different ways to be a mother, 'how we mother each other, and how we all still need mothering'. Growing up in Brighton, her world 'was run by mothers'. Her childhood was one of parties and music festivals, which left the bookish young Saba (her name comes from her Syrian heritage) longing for more rules. Her parents divorced when she was 11; she has a younger sister and a much younger half-brother. Her mother, a breastfeeding consultant, has recently gone back to university to train to be a midwife. Send Nudes is dedicated to her maternal grandmother. Having so few men in her life as a child, she was thrown to find herself the mother of three boys, 'but they are all so different from each other that it becomes impossible to know what 'a boy' even is,' she says. 'The world has changed, gender really does feel looser.' Send Nudes was written as a reaction against the 'simplified feminism' of those bubble-gum-pink go-girl affirmations all over Instagram when Sams was at university. She would look at the slogans and ask: 'OK, but what about this situation? What about this one?' Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Dodgy boyfriends, mean girls, lousy parents and body shame – Sams's stories do not make being a young woman today seem much fun. But then the reports of rising depression, anxiety and eating disorders among generation Z, particularly women, show that it really isn't. Add in financial insecurity and the existential threat of the climate catastrophe, and it's no wonder novels by a generation of female writers have come to be dubbed – rather patronisingly – 'sad-girl lit'. Feminist critic Jessa Crispin complained that Send Nudes conformed to this vogue for listless young female characters 'as helpless against the tides of fate as a jellyfish washed up on the beach'. This passivity could be seen as part of a generational helplessness in the face of world events. In fact, many of the stories are also celebrations of female resilience or agency, such as the title one in which the unnamed narrator finds liberation in sending a nude selfie to a stranger. 'Obviously, it's complex and it's shit sometimes,' Sams says of the reality she was trying to capture. 'But ultimately I wanted the stories to be about power and the slipperiness of control.' Far from being merely victims, many of her girls are drunk on their own youth and beauty. 'I think that there is loads of power in being a young woman,' Sams reflects. 'But your power is also your powerlessness. It's constantly eluding you.' Looking gorgeous might feel great, but 'it's just the patriarchy' and can always be weaponised against you. Like writers such as Ottessa Moshfegh (Sams is a big fan), she refuses to be coy about sex and body parts. 'I'm really interested in bodies, particularly women's bodies, periods and all of that,' she says. 'To me that feels overdue.' You can't write about women's bodies without also writing about shame. 'I was a chubby kid, and I felt bad about my body from around the age of six,' she says. 'I don't think it felt, like, rare.' She was determined to write a truthful delivery room scene, breaking waters and all. 'I was filling chapters,' she laughs. 'I was forcing my reader to witness this massive birth scene, because you give birth and no one cares. You're like: 'Listen to this – it's insane!'' And, rather than being an act of feminist subversion, she simply enjoys writing about sex. 'There's only so long you can write before you're like: 'Let's do a sex scene.' It's fun.' She gave a copy of Send Nudes to her grandparents with strict instructions not to read it. 'Obviously they would never have listened,' she jokes. 'But I don't know if they're as scary as just, like, the whole world.' Jacob is a horticulturist at Kew Gardens – 'He's a plant guy, it's cute' – and they have a small but lovely garden in east London. Now her middle son is at nursery, Sams likes to write in the cafe of a local independent cinema, where they don't hassle you to buy much and she can eavesdrop on conversations about films. Generally, she's not bothered by the buggy in the hall. Quite the opposite: 'For me, having kids and writing complement each other,' she explains. 'You experience time differently because toddlers are so slow and so interested in every tiny thing. Writing is the same: it takes ages and there's so much paying attention to things that are brushed over when you're just walking around.' Writing is the best way 'to be in love with being alive', she says, and there's nothing sad about that. Her phone buzzes. Time's up. It's her grandmother. She needs to go home and feed her new baby. Gunk by Saba Sams will be published by Bloomsbury on 8 May. To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
