Debuts of 2025, Volume 2: Saba Sams
The first novel from the Granta Best of Young British Novelist Saba Sams explores an alternative family set-up.
Halfway through my video call with Saba Sams, a beaming interloper pops up on my screen; her three-month-old baby has woken up from his nap and taken an interest in proceedings. This is a charmingly appropriate interruption, as we are discussing Sams’ debut novel, Gunk, which ruminates on motherhood in various forms.
Sams’ first book was the 2022 short story collection Send Nudes: “Everyone says to you: short stories don’t sell and post-Covid-19 it didn’t have a launch or anything.” But the short-story detractors were soon to be proved wrong. First, a rave review on publication: “I was like, what?!”, she says, laughing. “Why is my name in the Guardian?”. Then Blue 4eva, taken from Send Nudes, won the 2022 BBC National Short Story Award and in 2023 she was awarded the Edge Hill Short Story Prize, the only national literary award to recognise excellence in a single-authored short-story collection. Later that year, Sams was named on Granta’s once-in-a-decade list Best of Young British Novelists. Quite something for a writer yet to turn 30.
For her first novel, Sams explains that she always knew she wanted to write about alternative family set-ups. She sees the traditional, nuclear family “kind of dissolving” in the wake of the cost-of-living crisis and housing crises and, as a young mother herself (she had her first baby at the age of 22) who relies on her parents, grandparents and friends without children for help, says: “I definitely understand family is just a lot bigger than two parents and I wanted to look at that.”
Gunk begins with the narrator alone in a small flat with a wailing newborn (“24 hours and 17 minutes old”). The narrator, it is immediately clear, is not the baby’s mother and this sets up the central question: who is this woman and how did she come to be left with this tiny baby that she didn’t give birth to? Gunk then loops back in time in search of the answer.
The narrator is loner Jules, who has been divorced from her sleazy ex-husband Leon for five years but still works alongside him running his grotty student nightclub, Gunk, in Brighton. It is there that she meets 19-year-old, shaven-headed Nim who Leon has hired to work behind the bar. As Jules and Nim spend more time together, behind the bar and away from the club, they become closer and when Nim falls pregnant, with seemingly no family support, Jules agrees to help.
Over the course of the novel, Jules and Nim’s relationship remains ambiguous and they are prone to misreading and misunderstanding each other. Sams says of her central characters: “They are boss and employee to each other, they are housemates, they’ve slept with the same man. They play mother and daughter interchangeably to each other, I think. I wanted to write two characters who were everything to each other, who ticked every kind of narrow box.” People can be very strict about relationships, observes Sams, and quick to establish rules about them, but she is more interested in exploring those which are not easily definable.
Whether she is writing a short story or a novel, Sams’ first draft involves getting to know her characters. And then the second draft is realising: “Oh, they would never do that. And then it changes the direction of what you’re doing.”
The unprepossessing Leon, who appears to be mostly interested in opportunities to smoke or snort something, was the most fun to write, says Sams. “I like these characters who come in and out who have a real charisma, even if it’s a negative charisma, and a real energy… You know there’s going to be chaos every time he comes in. And for me, that’s really what keeps me writing, just that sense of: what is going to happen? And he brought that.”
But there is a poignancy to Leon’s drug-fuelled carousing too, which ends in rehab: the expectation, from the women in the novel and wider society, that he will be a rubbish father. In this way, she observes, the patriarchy affects men as negatively as it does women.
Sams was studying at Manchester University when she joined the Writing Squad, a collective writing group that offers workshops to young writers in the North of England. This led to the director, Steve Dearden, showing some of her work to then Bloomsbury editor Angelique Tran Van Sang, who offered Sams a book deal.
Even with all her success to date, Sams describes the upcoming publication of Gunk as scary: “I don’t want to let down readers who loved Send Nudes.” But on the other hand: “It feels like if Gunk is well received, I’m a real writer, you know. The second book feels like a step into – this is what I do now. Yeah, there’s a lot of feelings
flying around.”
Gunk: Bloomsbury, 8th May, HB, £16.99, 9781526621801
