Gunk

**A Guardian Book of the Summer 2025**

**Selected as a 2025 book to look out for by the Guardian, Sunday Times, Irish Times, independent.co.uk, Cosmopolitan, Elle and Service95**

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.

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.

About the Author

Saba Sams was raised in Brighton and now lives in London. She was selected for Granta's Best of Young British Novelists in 2023 and The Sunday Times' Young Power List in 2025. Her short story collection Send Nudes was awarded the Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2022 and was shortlisted for the University of Swansea International Dylan Thomas Prize 2023. The story 'Blue 4eva' from the collection was awarded the BBC National Short Story Award. Send Nudes was selected as a book of the year by the Guardian, Stylist, Vogue, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Evening Standard, Irish Independent, AnOther, Foyles and bookshop.org, and was named a Sunday Times paperback of the year in 2023.