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the complete review - fiction

The Palm House

by
Gwendoline Riley

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B+ : neatly turned and crafted

See our review for fuller assessment.

  Review Consensus:

  Generally very positive, but some much more enthusiastic than others

  From the Reviews:

• "The Palm House isn’t only a satire on the London literary scene. The bulk of the novel consists of five extended scenes that read like short stories, having their own internal rhythms and symmetries. (...) It’s possible to read The Palm House as a series of character studies of terrible or at least flawed men (.....) It is in these moments that Riley shows that her primary concern is with language: its specificity and its quiet betrayals." - Jon Day, Financial Times
  
  
• "Laura’s recollections are offered levelly and without self-pity but, against their small annihilations, the affectionate understanding she shares with Putnam feels like a quiet miracle. Riley writes with a poet’s control, her prose so purely distilled that it appears artless. (...) Riley’s characters remain, as humans must, mostly unknown to one another, the experiences that have formed them hidden from view, but in the attentive steadiness of friendship there is hope, perhaps even healing." - Clare Clark, The Guardian
  
  
• "The Palm House is narrated by a woman who, through a series of recollections of her upbringing and musings on her current life, seems to be trying to understand the oppressive force that mediocrity can exert. (...) But how do these threads -- a workplace drama and a story of what might charitably be called romantic failure -- fit together? Riley’s novel can be read as parallel narratives of trauma and the ways we avoid confronting it (.....) Riley doesn’t make the connections explicit. Instead, she offers a series of often dazzlingly perceptive portraits, letting them sit side by side as fragments of information not yet processed." - John-Baptiste Oduor, Literary Review
  
  
• "One doesn’t read Riley for plot; each book is an assemblage of episodes. (...) The symmetry -- what are friends if not the people you turn to for help disposing of rubbish ? -- gives a kind of plot structure to The Palm House, which threatens to topple into another book: about Laura’s vulgar mother, Laura’s teenage pursuit of a stand-up comic who efficiently makes use of her, her quirky boyfriends, her endless house moves. (...) Riley’s prose, like a greenhouse, is equal parts brittle transparency and wrought-iron strength." - Ange Mlinko, London Review of Books
  
  
• "The Palm House is an unnerving anomaly: a book by Riley written in ordinary ink. It lacks a pressing subject, that unmistakable sense of aboutness. Or perhaps it has too much of a Subject. (...) If the book’s flatness is out of character, it may be because it is, in a sense, written out of character. Riley once said she couldn’t write in the third person (“it always sounds so false”). The Palm House may be the closest she has come to a third-person perspective, or at least a split perspective (.....) The parts do not really hang together." - Lola Seaton, New Statesman
  
  
• "[Riley] eschews euphemism and writes in a stark, exacting prose that achieves a clarity of vision when it comes to human behavior. (...) There is a lot of wreckage in The Palm House (.....) Relative to her previous two novels, there is something clipped and minimalist about The Palm House, but satisfyingly so, narrative threads trimmed just as they threaten to take over the book." - Christian Lorentzen, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "Gwendoline Riley’s new novel is stuffed to the gills with the sort of people she has come to specialise in – who, once assembled, supply a kind of casebook of rebarbativeness. (...) What it is, on the other hand, is a novel about staying the course and coming to terms. (...) Style-wise, Riley is a fan of gaps, spaces, insinuations and stray glimpses that fleetingly illuminate her characters’ lives rather than drench them in arc light. Neatly and pertinently written, The Palm House seems oddly like a much longer work mischievously reproduced in shorthand." - D.J. Taylor, The Spectator
  
  
• "Riley’s prose is seamless. Much work has gone into buffing it down, smoothing it so that no effort shows: before you can consciously realise it, you’ve read one scene and are on to the next. Her mission to record and “get it right”, as Laura insists at one point, feels radical in our inattentive world, and the images she finds in doing so are beautiful. (...) The expression “at the height of a novelist’s powers” is bandied around too often, but it was the phrase that came to mind when reading The Palm House. (...) I’m sure I won’t be the only one to say that The Palm House is her best novel yet." - Lucy Thynne, The Telegraph
  
  
• "(A) triumph of non-sentimental nostalgia. (...) The novel is composed of a series of vignettes that loosely follow the strained friendship between Laura Miller, a writer of cool, recessive temperament, and Edmund Putnam, the deputy editor at Sequence, a high-minded magazine slowly curdling into irrelevance. (...) Riley’s novels draw their energy from tense relationships and cringeworthy encounters, depicted with pitiless clarity. Her instinct is to probe the fault lines between the comic and the horrific. (...) I read it in a single sitting, then immediately read it again to test its spell, which grew stronger. It establishes Riley as one of our most brilliant fiction writers" - Johanna Thomas-Corr, The Times
  
  
• "(A) finely observed and highly oblique portrayal of London bohemians. It is a book that leads with its rigorously achieved style, which is stripped down, dryly unsentimental and keenly attuned to the tensions present in families and friendships. (...) Cumulatively, Ms. Riley evokes fragile feelings of vulnerability and longing among her characters, while gesturing toward a potential for contentedness in community and intellectual integrity. (...) In this talented author’s relentless paring back, too many interesting things have been cut away." - Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       The Palm House is narrated by Laura Miller. Around forty years old, she moved on from freelancing to being an assistant editor at a monthly history magazine -- though it's only a three-days-a-week job ("The rest of the week I wrote pieces or looked at the writing I was doing just for myself"); in any case, she barely mentions work(ing). (By the end she has moved on to some job at the BFI, though readers learn nothing more about the transition or the job than that.)
       Presented in five parts, the novel is loosely bookended by friend Edmund Putnam's departure and then return to Sequence, a magazine he had worked at for just over half his life when he left (he's forty-nine now). Putnam abandons Sequence when a new editor, Simon 'Shove' Halfpenny, is appointed and comes in eager: "to turn Sequence into the New Yorker. 'A sort of London version of the New Yorker,' he explained." (As many reviewers have pointed out, the 'Shove'-reign at Sequence reminds strongly of 'Stig' Abell's ill-fated turn heading the Times Literary Supplement.)
       Laura -- who had published "three long pieces in Sequence over the last twenty years" -- had first met Putnam when she was at UCL, at a career fair, and they remained friends. The Palm House opens with them in casual conversation, and while the novel isn't all talk, there is a great deal of it -- not just between these two, but in Laura's interactions with others, including a horrific episode from her teens she recounts.
       Much of the novel focuses on community -- friendship and family --, though more on just a simple sense of connection than any deeper ties. Laura's mother, for example, takes up, sort of, with a man -- with Laura at one point noting: "It struck me later that it was only me who called David her boyfriend. All she’d ever said, in all those years, was that they 'went around together'".
       As David explains in speaking with Putnam:

     ‘Well, no one wants to be totally alone, do they?’ Putnam said.
     ‘Plenty of people,’ he said, ‘most people, would take anything going rather than be alone.’

     ‘I’m happy,’ he said, when talking about that. ‘I mean I’m miserable, obviously, but I am happy, because I see a bigger picture, and I know I’m not alone.’

I don’t think I had a real conversation with anyone except Lisa, that year. I spoke up in seminars. Nobody spoke to me. Waiting outside the lecture hall I was a pair of hopeful eyes. I was, again, a hand holding tight to a shoulder bag strap.

     What next ? I wondered.
     I lay in the bath and wondered.

- M.A.Orthofer, 21 April 2026

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Links:

• New York Review Books publicity page
• Picador publicity page
• Profile in The Guardian

• fallow
• 4Columns
• The Guardian
• Kirkus Reviews
• Literary Review
• Los Angeles Review of Books
• Off the Prize
• Tumbleweed Words
• writing.ie

• Gwendoline Riley at RCW Literary Agency

• See Index of Contemporary British fiction
• Other books from New York Review Books

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About the Author:

       British author Gwendoline Riley was born in 1979.

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© 2026 the complete review

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