Mpr News With Kerri Miller

Jo Hamya’s new novel, “The Hypocrite,” opens as the trap is being laid. Sophia, a 20-something playwright, has invited her father, a famous and provocative British novelist, to come see her new work. As the play begins, he is shocked to realize he recognizes the set. It’s a replica of the kitchen in his vacation home near Sicily. Then the lead actor saunters onstage wearing the author’s favorite shirt and proceeds to have loud sex with a woman he just picked up at a bar. The audience roars. The author is undone. At the same moment, Sophia is having lunch with her mother at a nearby cafe and fretting over what her father will think of the play. Her mother, the writer’s ex-wife, is both sympathetic and cavalier, weary of dealing with self-absorbed artists and yet unable to abandon her martyrdom. Who is the hypocrite here? All of them. Hamya’s novel is a bracing, complex and uncompromising look at the generation conflicts in our present age. She joins MPR News host Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold