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Gunk
A Cosmopolitan book to look out for in 2025
'An immersive story about love and the softening borders around what family can be' Sheena Patel
'An intimate and tender exploration of love's possibilities' Sophie Mackintosh
Jules has been divorced from her ex-husband Leon for five years, but she still works alongside him at Gunk, the grotty student nightclub he owns in central Brighton. She spends her nights serving shots and watching, from behind the bar, as Leon flirts with students on the dancefloor. In the early hours of the morning, she paces home to sleep.
But then Leon hires nineteen-year-old Nim to work the bar with Jules – Nim, with her shaved head and steady pour, her disarming sweetness and sudden distance – and Jules finds herself jolted awake. When Nim discovers she's pregnant, Jules agrees to help. As the months pass, and the relationship between the two women grows increasingly intimate and perplexing, it emerges that Nim has her own unexpected gifts to give.
Now, alone in her small flat, Jules is holding a baby, just twenty-four-hours old, who still smells of Nim. But no one knows where Nim is, or if she's coming back. What could the future – for Jules, Nim, and this unnamed baby – possibly look like?
Raw, exhilarating, tender and wise, Gunk is an electrifying debut novel exploring love and desire, safety and destruction, chaos and control – and family in all its forms.
Praise for Saba Sams
'Sams is the real deal' LUCY KIRKWOOD, GUARDIAN
'A bold new talent' STYLIST
'I can't wait to see what she writes next' PANDORA SYKES
'An immersive story about love and the softening borders around what family can be' Sheena Patel
'An intimate and tender exploration of love's possibilities' Sophie Mackintosh
Jules has been divorced from her ex-husband Leon for five years, but she still works alongside him at Gunk, the grotty student nightclub he owns in central Brighton. She spends her nights serving shots and watching, from behind the bar, as Leon flirts with students on the dancefloor. In the early hours of the morning, she paces home to sleep.
But then Leon hires nineteen-year-old Nim to work the bar with Jules – Nim, with her shaved head and steady pour, her disarming sweetness and sudden distance – and Jules finds herself jolted awake. When Nim discovers she's pregnant, Jules agrees to help. As the months pass, and the relationship between the two women grows increasingly intimate and perplexing, it emerges that Nim has her own unexpected gifts to give.
Now, alone in her small flat, Jules is holding a baby, just twenty-four-hours old, who still smells of Nim. But no one knows where Nim is, or if she's coming back. What could the future – for Jules, Nim, and this unnamed baby – possibly look like?
Raw, exhilarating, tender and wise, Gunk is an electrifying debut novel exploring love and desire, safety and destruction, chaos and control – and family in all its forms.
Praise for Saba Sams
'Sams is the real deal' LUCY KIRKWOOD, GUARDIAN
'A bold new talent' STYLIST
'I can't wait to see what she writes next' PANDORA SYKES
228 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 8, 2025
125 people are currently reading
12373 people want to read
About the author
Saba Sams
5 books161 followersSaba Sams is a fiction writer based in London. Her stories have appeared in The Stinging Fly and The Tangerine. She was shortlisted for The White Review Short Story Prize in 2019. Her debut collection of short stories Send Nudes was published by Bloomsbury in 2022.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 271 reviews
June 16, 2025
Acclaimed writer Saba Sams’s debut novel grew from her desire to read a convincing birth scene; it was while crafting that episode Sams came up with her narrator Jules who serves as witness to this birth. The rest of Sam’s book flowed from these images, a slice-of-life, short story that just kept going. Sams sets out to interrogate dominant concepts of motherhood, intent on questioning the narrowness of notions of what does or doesn’t make a family. For Jules family is synonymous with convention. She grew up in a suburb close to Brighton, experiencing her parents’ careful attention as close to smothering. Jules dreamt instead of having her own child, establishing a relationship where she’s the one in control. As an adult, Jules moves to central Brighton where she ends up working at a shabby nightclub Gunk. A dilapidated space that appeals to rich students intent on rebelling against their bourgeois origins. Gunk’s owner is an older man Leon who possesses a kind of sleazy charisma, Jules eventually marries then later divorces him but takes on running his club. It’s there Jules becomes entangled with the much younger Nim whose unexpected pregnancy will bind them together in entirely unanticipated ways.
Sams is drawing on aspects of her own life here, she had the first of her three children while still a student, and her family circle is opened up to friends and relatives, rather than locked down in nuclear family mode. A form that clearly no longer works for women, if it ever did. Sams is interested in mothering as a practice: who mothers, who’s mothered and how. She also wants to chronicle the essential messiness of everyday life: Nim’s feelings for Jules; Jules’s complicated emotions for ex Leon and so on. Sams’s novel unfolds at a languid pace, the claustrophobic world within worlds represented by Gunk underlined by the claustrophobic atmosphere that pervades her story. Sams’s accomplished prose is often direct and visceral, but it can also be lyrical and tender echoing elements of the tentative bonds being formed between Nim, Jules and the unnamed child – although sometimes that tenderness threatens to tip over into sentimentality.
Sams touches on external, social issues around mothering – such as the surveillance culture mothers are routinely subjected to – but I wanted her to dig deeper, to say more about the political and economic aspects of contemporary parenting. Instead, the primary focus here is on Jules and her evolving state of mind. And I just didn’t find Jules entirely convincing. I couldn’t fully comprehend what was driving her desperation to have and raise a child. It seemed so vastly removed from any consideration of the child itself and its potential needs. It felt, to me at least, as if Jules’s impulse was closer to yearning for some unobtainable object or commodity – an extension of consumerism. However, it transpired that this type of transactionality was very much part of what Sams was seeking to explore and undermine, it’s just that this aspect of her narrative came a little too late, and was a little too rushed, to satisfy. For all that this was a well-observed, absorbing read, likely to appeal to fans of authors like Gwendoline Riley.
Thanks to Netgalley and to publisher Bloomsbury Circus for an ARC
Sams is drawing on aspects of her own life here, she had the first of her three children while still a student, and her family circle is opened up to friends and relatives, rather than locked down in nuclear family mode. A form that clearly no longer works for women, if it ever did. Sams is interested in mothering as a practice: who mothers, who’s mothered and how. She also wants to chronicle the essential messiness of everyday life: Nim’s feelings for Jules; Jules’s complicated emotions for ex Leon and so on. Sams’s novel unfolds at a languid pace, the claustrophobic world within worlds represented by Gunk underlined by the claustrophobic atmosphere that pervades her story. Sams’s accomplished prose is often direct and visceral, but it can also be lyrical and tender echoing elements of the tentative bonds being formed between Nim, Jules and the unnamed child – although sometimes that tenderness threatens to tip over into sentimentality.
Sams touches on external, social issues around mothering – such as the surveillance culture mothers are routinely subjected to – but I wanted her to dig deeper, to say more about the political and economic aspects of contemporary parenting. Instead, the primary focus here is on Jules and her evolving state of mind. And I just didn’t find Jules entirely convincing. I couldn’t fully comprehend what was driving her desperation to have and raise a child. It seemed so vastly removed from any consideration of the child itself and its potential needs. It felt, to me at least, as if Jules’s impulse was closer to yearning for some unobtainable object or commodity – an extension of consumerism. However, it transpired that this type of transactionality was very much part of what Sams was seeking to explore and undermine, it’s just that this aspect of her narrative came a little too late, and was a little too rushed, to satisfy. For all that this was a well-observed, absorbing read, likely to appeal to fans of authors like Gwendoline Riley.
Thanks to Netgalley and to publisher Bloomsbury Circus for an ARC
May 21, 2025
Loved this so much! The characters are frustrating in a Sally Rooney kinda way but I loved the exploration into relationships, this was right up my street
February 1, 2025
For Nim and me, there is no word either, no neat category. We’re more than friends, less than lovers. We’re intimate but not sexual. I’m old enough to be her young mother, young enough to be her older girlfriend. We’ve slept with the same man, worked the same job. We lived as housemates but we shared a bed. Now, she’s had a baby but the baby is mine. It occurs to me that perhaps this has been the problem, for Nim and me. We’ve been caught up in trying to define what we have. I tried to limit her to employee, to housemate, to surrogate. In turn, her approach was expansion; she reached up for romantic love. I see that we’ve been trapped by language, by legitimacy.
Saba Sams story Blue 4eva won the 2022 BBC National Short Story Award, the judges citing its "transportive atmosphere, its masterful telling of complex family dynamics and the sense of building tension", and the collection in which it was included, Send Nudes, won the 2022 Edge Hill Prize.
But it was on the strength of this, at that time forthcoming, novel, Gunk that, in 2023, she was included on Granta’s decennial Best of Young British Novelists.
Gunk is a well-crafted story of another unconventional set-up. The novel opens with our narrator Jules, in her flat, caring for a 1-day old baby, but which is not hers:
I’m not the baby’s mother, and this is why he cries. He has no language to tell me that I’m not right for him, and yet he tells me with his body, with his eyes. I was naïve to think that, if I scooped him straight from the womb and held him immediately to my bare chest, so in his first breaths he would inhale only my smell, he would mistake me as his. I was wrong to think that, if I brought him home, all of time would be erased. In reality, the flat was just as we’d left it: the bath full with cool, blue water; Nim’s clothes a twisted loop on the floor; the ice cube tray upside down in the sink.
Much of the novel then explains how this came about - I will include in spoiler tags given this is an ARC, although the blurb gives much of it away, and the plot is less the point than the relationships between Jules and the other characters.
Nim, the baby's mother, neatly skewers Jules's perceive self-sufficiency as well as what perhaps attracts her to others with perceived needs:
You worry about me, you worry about Leon. You don’t think anyone can stand on their own two feet, except yourself. Imagine if I dared to worry about you, Jules. You’d be so offended you’d never speak to me again.
[...]
Nim swam for fifteen minutes, maybe more. I sifted pebbles through my hands and thought about how she was right: I was determined to think of myself as above other people. Was this why I wanted a baby? Was this why other people kept on having babies? Despite the strain of pregnancy, the agony of birth, despite the terror of unknowable love, we wanted so badly to see ourselves in somebody else, and we wanted to have control over that person. We wanted a chance to build a destiny, from day one.
Buddies, the 24/7 cafe on Brighton seafront, now closed, which, alongside the ficticious Gunk, plays a key role in the novel
A quick and immersive read, although perhaps a little conventional for my taste and expectations after the Granta listing, and lacking the tension of Blue4Eva - I wonder if the short-form is the author's strong suit.
Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC.
Saba Sams story Blue 4eva won the 2022 BBC National Short Story Award, the judges citing its "transportive atmosphere, its masterful telling of complex family dynamics and the sense of building tension", and the collection in which it was included, Send Nudes, won the 2022 Edge Hill Prize.
But it was on the strength of this, at that time forthcoming, novel, Gunk that, in 2023, she was included on Granta’s decennial Best of Young British Novelists.
Gunk is a well-crafted story of another unconventional set-up. The novel opens with our narrator Jules, in her flat, caring for a 1-day old baby, but which is not hers:
I’m not the baby’s mother, and this is why he cries. He has no language to tell me that I’m not right for him, and yet he tells me with his body, with his eyes. I was naïve to think that, if I scooped him straight from the womb and held him immediately to my bare chest, so in his first breaths he would inhale only my smell, he would mistake me as his. I was wrong to think that, if I brought him home, all of time would be erased. In reality, the flat was just as we’d left it: the bath full with cool, blue water; Nim’s clothes a twisted loop on the floor; the ice cube tray upside down in the sink.
Much of the novel then explains how this came about - I will include in spoiler tags given this is an ARC, although the blurb gives much of it away, and the plot is less the point than the relationships between Jules and the other characters.
Nim, the baby's mother, neatly skewers Jules's perceive self-sufficiency as well as what perhaps attracts her to others with perceived needs:
You worry about me, you worry about Leon. You don’t think anyone can stand on their own two feet, except yourself. Imagine if I dared to worry about you, Jules. You’d be so offended you’d never speak to me again.
[...]
Nim swam for fifteen minutes, maybe more. I sifted pebbles through my hands and thought about how she was right: I was determined to think of myself as above other people. Was this why I wanted a baby? Was this why other people kept on having babies? Despite the strain of pregnancy, the agony of birth, despite the terror of unknowable love, we wanted so badly to see ourselves in somebody else, and we wanted to have control over that person. We wanted a chance to build a destiny, from day one.
Buddies, the 24/7 cafe on Brighton seafront, now closed, which, alongside the ficticious Gunk, plays a key role in the novel
A quick and immersive read, although perhaps a little conventional for my taste and expectations after the Granta listing, and lacking the tension of Blue4Eva - I wonder if the short-form is the author's strong suit.
Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC.
December 11, 2025
5️⃣🌟, the "brat" as said by Jack Edwards
───── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ─────
#️⃣6️⃣7️⃣2️⃣ Read & Reviewed in 2025 🧊🏔️
Date Read: Sunday, December 7, 2025 ☃️🌨️
12th read in "Its TIMEEEE!!!!! (to read more books)" December ❄️⛄
So this is the 'brat' that Jack Edwards recommended that pretty much is in the setting of a club and bars and city party life. But the story itself is not particularly a "365 party girl 🍏"
I mean it's a lesbian love story 💕. Pretty brat if u ask me. It is a story that takes inspiration from the author's life so this novel it's closer to the author's personal experiences and honestly makes this book more authentic. This is a book that expands on motherly desires and responsibilities. A book that touches on societal issues about mothers and parenting. Honestly there are so many "mothers" and mother related terminologies and ye — MOTHERS.
I love the relationship and the dynamic between Nim & Jules. It feels like the relationship between both of them is with high amounts of chemistry. It's not really a romance book but rather more of a support between friends and acquaintances that sort of become romantic. The writing style is great and modern and it's all so simpliticly deep. It also has many other commentary to other aspects of society other than the obvious — MOTHERS and that is exactly what makes this book a highly deep and informational read.
Spice Level 🌶️: 1️⃣, 365 party girl
Vibe ☘️: brat 🍏
Who'd Like This ❓👥: People who are indefinitely intrigued with that egg book cover 🥚
───── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ─────
#️⃣6️⃣7️⃣2️⃣ Read & Reviewed in 2025 🧊🏔️
Date Read: Sunday, December 7, 2025 ☃️🌨️
12th read in "Its TIMEEEE!!!!! (to read more books)" December ❄️⛄
So this is the 'brat' that Jack Edwards recommended that pretty much is in the setting of a club and bars and city party life. But the story itself is not particularly a "365 party girl 🍏"
I mean it's a lesbian love story 💕. Pretty brat if u ask me. It is a story that takes inspiration from the author's life so this novel it's closer to the author's personal experiences and honestly makes this book more authentic. This is a book that expands on motherly desires and responsibilities. A book that touches on societal issues about mothers and parenting. Honestly there are so many "mothers" and mother related terminologies and ye — MOTHERS.
I love the relationship and the dynamic between Nim & Jules. It feels like the relationship between both of them is with high amounts of chemistry. It's not really a romance book but rather more of a support between friends and acquaintances that sort of become romantic. The writing style is great and modern and it's all so simpliticly deep. It also has many other commentary to other aspects of society other than the obvious — MOTHERS and that is exactly what makes this book a highly deep and informational read.
Spice Level 🌶️: 1️⃣, 365 party girl
Vibe ☘️: brat 🍏
Who'd Like This ❓👥: People who are indefinitely intrigued with that egg book cover 🥚
March 14, 2025
This is a little more conventional than I expected from Sams. Though it's set in grotty flats and a seedy club, at heart it's another motherhood book, even if it rattles the contours of that narrative. We even get a summary soundbite: 'we've been caught up in trying to define what we have. I tried to limit her to employee, to housemate, to surrogate. In turn, her approach was expansion; she reached up for romantic love. I see that we've been trapped by language, by legitimacy. But there is no need.'
A bit too much baby stuff for my personal taste.
Thanks to the publisher for an ARC via Netgalley
A bit too much baby stuff for my personal taste.
Thanks to the publisher for an ARC via Netgalley
February 8, 2025
Owie this hurt
May 31, 2025
First 5 star of the year. My early predictions were correct, I loved it. Loved the writing, loved the story and loved the characters (Yes, even Leon). Another stunning exploration of relationships by Saba Sams. I eagerly await another.
August 2, 2025
this was so well written i felt like i was sucked into the pages
the age gap made me squirm a bit but that's obviously the intention and the focus really is more on nuclear families and how love transcends tradition
absolute must read! really want to read send nudes now!
the age gap made me squirm a bit but that's obviously the intention and the focus really is more on nuclear families and how love transcends tradition
absolute must read! really want to read send nudes now!
May 25, 2025
4.5!! i really really loved this!!
Read
June 14, 2025One of the best bits of Send Nudes was the way Saba gently showed her stories, not explaining them, but just letting them work for themselves. Gunk felt like the opposite of this! It felt like I was being told an anecdote by a friend in which all the events and feelings were paraphrased. I’m not sure if this focus on backstory and explaining the plot was her way of trying to transition from short form to novel? But overall it still felt like a short story that been drawn out into a novel — with all the bits that might have been mysterious and magic in short form just underdeveloped and thin in long form. Sorry Saba!
October 7, 2025
Page turner :p
June 17, 2025
If a sally rooney book was set in corp
November 6, 2025
This one really sucked me in woweee.
June 18, 2025
This was a really interesting way to examine motherhood from all sorts of angles. Jules wants to be a mother because she's given up on romantic love in her life and wants the love of a child instead. Nim is interested in older women because her mother never chose her over chasing the love of a man. Leon's mother dotes on her grown son and can see no wrong in him, despite his being an immature predator who runs a student nightclub. As much as I enjoyed peeling back the layers of these characters (even Leon), I was unsatisfied by the end, hence a lower than five-star rating for me.
June 13, 2025
“My life had been small and dark for so long, and now Nim had prised her way inside and detonated.”
Loved this new book from Saba Sams, having only read Send Nudes last week, I was excited to get into this and it did not disappoint. A deep and thoughtful story of love and family and raw characters. I felt for Jules and Nim, loved their entwined storyline.
Finished in a day and already want more from the author!✨
Loved this new book from Saba Sams, having only read Send Nudes last week, I was excited to get into this and it did not disappoint. A deep and thoughtful story of love and family and raw characters. I felt for Jules and Nim, loved their entwined storyline.
Finished in a day and already want more from the author!✨
Read
May 21, 2025Holding off on a star rating for now, because I really don't know what to think. This is beautifully written and I was glued to the page, but my feelings really hinge on where the author stands on the age gap between Jules and Nim. I can't help but think that ten years down the line, Nim's recounting of the events of this book might sound similar to Jules' memories of her terrible marriage. If this was the author's intention, this is an incredible and bleak book. If not, well. I dunno. I liked this book a lot, but it left a bad taste in my mouth. I just want Nim to prosper
May 20, 2025
3⭐️
pros ✅
- very quick, well paced
- liked the back and forth of flashback and present events
- well fleshed out and believable characters
- Min’s initial description was very detailed and vivid, could clearly picture her throughout
- very easy, gentle and pleasurable read
cons ❌
- BRING BACK MY SPEECH MARKS
- Min bring in love with Jules was not even remotely a surprise. Was it meant to be a surprise to the reader?
- nothing ground-breaking or new or rip roaringly funny or especially warm. probably forgettable in the long run
pros ✅
- very quick, well paced
- liked the back and forth of flashback and present events
- well fleshed out and believable characters
- Min’s initial description was very detailed and vivid, could clearly picture her throughout
- very easy, gentle and pleasurable read
cons ❌
- BRING BACK MY SPEECH MARKS
- Min bring in love with Jules was not even remotely a surprise. Was it meant to be a surprise to the reader?
- nothing ground-breaking or new or rip roaringly funny or especially warm. probably forgettable in the long run
September 3, 2025
Wow, what an addicting book! The dynamic between Jules, Leon, and Nim was relatable and fascinating. Heavy on the theme of female friendships/relationships, motherhood, chaos, and impulse, this book really highlights the emotions and confusion we endure in life. I was consumed by the plot. The writing was also beautiful. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
August 22, 2025
Quite disappointed I didn’t enjoy this, I think it’s because I thought it was about queer love but it wasn’t :(
August 19, 2025
Such a fascinating lens to examine motherhood from, I was completely hooked from the get go. My only gripe is that it could have been even more unconventional and delved deeper into the intricacies of relationships.
February 8, 2025
This book wasn’t for me, I’ll admit, but I thought the writing was gorgeous and vivid.
July 28, 2025
Goed boek, makkelijk vast te pakken
October 3, 2025
5 ⭐️ absolute wonders
April 8, 2025
yes yes yes very very good
May 31, 2025
3.75 ⭐️
June 15, 2025
the most observant piece of literature I have ever read! i would actually start it again right now!
September 2, 2025
Largely unnecessary?
July 14, 2025
sally rooney but queer, 3.5/5
Displaying 1 - 30 of 271 reviews