BOOK REVIEW: THE PALM HOUSE By Gwendoline Riley (London, Picador, 2026)
Every so often I come across a writer whose writing leaves me thinking, wanting more of the writing that lends itself to making the very ordinary into something quite extraordinary. Gwendoline Riley is one such writer. I read her novel FIRST LOVE a couple of years ago and was impressed by her carefully carved prose, the deep interiority of her characters, and the past and present overlapping in a tight space. Her latest novel, THE PALM HOUSE, longlisted for this years’ Booker Prize, is similarly a novel about a few characters wrapped up in the monotony of the everyday, but there is so much depth to those moments, so much interiority, that you are left thinking about them for days afterwards.
Laura Miller and Edward Putnam are like-minded friends. They spend evenings after work hanging out in a pub overlooking the Thames, talking about the ups and downs of their days, their adolescence, and their friendships. When Putnam is upset by the arrival of a new editor at the magazine where he works, he begins an obsessive rant to Laura until he finally resigns. Putnam struggles to adapt to his new editor, a brash go-getter called Simon "Call Me Shove" Halfpenny. Putnam is self-obsessed, an overthinker. Unlike him, Laura seems to sail through her life without too much fuss. The novel goes back and forth in time in tight episodic sections, where we confront Laura's taut relationship with her single mother, and her elusive and unpleasant father. There is also the deeply disturbing underlying material, the teenage crushes that curdled into abuse, and the long shadow this casts over her relationships as a grown woman. Behind a veneer of calm, Laura finds herself balancing the unstable and unusual in her life against the small, quiet moments she cherishes as she grows older.
Riley’s material is similar to that in her previous writing. The self-obsessed, unconventional mother seems a recurring theme but Riley masters her characters so that we are totally drawn in to the uneasy situations by the non-confrontational narrator. It’s a novel about the past and its repercussions, good or bad on the future and the choices we make and have to live with. The prose is lyrical, distilled to the last drop, so it is crystal clear. It is a sharply observed narrative of the disillusionments of middle age and the struggle against modernity and encroaching societal change and expectation.
‘Welcome to mid-career,’ said Vik,’ ‘where everyone cares just that little bit less about anything you say or do.’
It's a novel that, in its episodic beats, reveals the small joys of precarious living in an ever-changing societal landscape.
THE PALM HOUSE: Gwendoline Riley ( Picador, 2026)