The Palm House

By: Gwendoline Riley

Published by New York Review of Books, 2026-04-14

From the author of My Phantoms and First Love, a droll and quietly evocative novel about work, friendship, family, and the path—so often muddled—toward finding one’s place in life.

In The Palm House, Laura's long friendship with Edmund Putnam is tested when he resigns from Sequence magazine—one of the few places he has ever felt he belonged. Putnam repines. His sweet-natured father has recently died, which has not improved his mood. Meanwhile Laura's relentlessly “outward-facing” mother is still at large and toting a new boyfriend as if he were a marotte. Laura, too, needs a new job, and a place to live that doesn't have centipedes in the kitchen.

Gwendoline Riley's seventh novel explores acceptance and affinity. Young people don't drink anymore but Laura and Putnam are no longer young. Over wine and crisps the pair reflect on what has brought them to where they are. There are memories of childhood package holidays, teenage friendships and obsessions, peculiar love affairs, bad parties.

Life is fleeting. Sequence magazine means something, but what? Might Putnam plot a return? The Palm House looks at what it means to find, understand, and accept where one fits.