Review: Gunk by Saba Sams
Shortlisted for the 2026 Nota Bene Prize, Gunk is an electrifying debut novel exploring love and desire, safety and destruction, chaos and control – and family in all its forms.
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 dance floor.
But then Leon hires nineteen-year-old Nim to work the bar – and her arrival jolts Jules awake for the first time in years. 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.
REVIEWED BY EMILY GOULDING
Saba Sams’ Gunk tells the story of the increasingly intimate and complex relationship between the frustrated ex-wife of a student nightclub owner and the enigmatic young woman hired to work the establishment's bar. It’s a story of desire, repression, and control but, above all, it’s one that reframes the word family, exploring all the forms that it can take.
Send Nudes, Sams’ previous collection of short stories, was among one of the first proofs I ever received, so being able to review Gunk, her debut novel, has been a really lovely full-circle moment. I remember when I read Send Nudes, Sams' writing was electrifying, and her exploration of the experience of womanhood was one that stuck with me for a while after. This is taken to a new level in her debut novel, Gunk, which delves into motherhood and what that can mean for different women. Questions of nature vs nurture are raised here, as well as thinking about generational cycles; are we fated to become our mothers, and can we overcome the way we’re raised over time?
The relationship between our two protagonists, Jules and Nim, is a clever and complicated one; it mirrors multiple relationship forms – romantic, maternal, and professional. At times nurturing, at times claustrophobic, it’s a masterclass in stripping back the politics of the different connections that we can have between people, and a reminder that, as humans, we all come with layers of history and unpredictability.