Gunk review – unconventional baby love in Brighton

Gunk
Saba Sams
Bloomsbury, £16.99, pp240

Saba Sams was just 26 when her debut short story collection, Send Nudes, won the 2022 Edge Hill short story prize, and one of the tales therein, Blue 4eva, won the BBC national short story award. A writer clearly worth watching. The anticipation for her first novel was heightened when she was picked for Granta’s once-in-a-decade best of young British novelists list. Now that first novel is here and she is still only 29.

Named after the grotty Brighton student club where much of its action takes place, Gunk is set in environs previously encountered in Send Nudes. In that book, though, there was an emphasis on young women coming of age, but here Sams turns her attention to a slightly older protagonist.

Jules is a divorcee in her 30s who longs to become a mother, though she seems unable to conceive. She’s the manager of Gunk, the club that’s owned by her flaky ex-husband, Leon, who’s too busy doing lines, knocking back shots and sleeping with his much younger staff and clientele to deal with the day-to-day running of the place. Self-contained and a tad standoffish, Jules is surprised to find herself disarmed by an unexpected friendship with the club’s newest member of staff: 19-year-old Nim, self-possessed and street smart.

The women develop a closeness that defies traditional categorisation, Nim prising her way inside Jules’s previously “small and dark” life and detonating it from within: “All around me were smithereens. I looked up, and found scraps of sky,” Jules observes.

But what they are to each other becomes increasingly knotty when Nim falls pregnant after an ill-judged one-night stand with Leon and then says she wants to give Jules the baby to raise as her own.

Despite the unconventional lives it depicts, Gunk is surprisingly neat and risk-averse, which gives it the air of a slightly over-workshopped short story, compacted where it should feel expansive and with notably less bite than its author’s earlier edgy tales.

That said, at its best, Sams’s prose is fresh as new paint, largely thanks to the striking simplicity of her descriptions. Jules’s account of the baby’s birth is particularly memorable: raw, powerful and beautiful in the plain-spokenness of a life cracking open to enfold a new being: “In my arms he was a light-source, an impossible beam, a strobe cutting through the dancefloor. He was so bright that looking at him hurt my eyes. I could not look away.”

Most interestingly, though, in exploring less commonly written-about intimacies and entanglements, Gunk pushes the popular motherhood narrative in a potentially fruitful new direction.

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Photograph by Getty Images