Gunk

Sams's debut novel follows two women and a much younger man building an improvised household around a baby that isn't quite anyone's in the conventional sense. Reviewers focused on how the book refuses to resolve its central relationship into a clean label, romantic, platonic, familial, treating that ambiguity as the point rather than a problem to solve. The nightclub setting gives the book its texture: critics noted the club scenes read as lived-in and specific rather than atmospheric wallpaper, and that the writing around pregnancy and birth is unusually physical and unsentimental.