What happens when a parent and a child begin to see each other as real people? That is the question at the heart of Jo Hamya’s acerbic novel The Hypocrite, which follows Sophia, a playwright and a child of divorce, and her nameless father, an Amis-esque, womanising writer who spends his days ‘getting to grips with being on social media’ and being cancelled. He has not read any reviews of his daughter’s new play. So it is with horror that he discovers that the play not only holds his work ‘up against the entirety of her generation’s values’, but also contains a damning re-creation of a holiday they took in Sicily ten years earlier.

Being made to watch his own crimes and sexual liaisons acted out on stage is painful enough. But he’s not sure which is the larger slight: the fact ‘that she will continually expose him to a new cohort night after night’ or that the actor playing him has ‘geometrically cut