Eimear McBride

"By the award-winning author of A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, Strange Hotel is a book about grief, travel, and female loneliness narrated by an unnamed middle-aged woman from a series of hotel rooms around the world"--

Strange Hotel

From Eimear McBride, author of the award-winning A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, comes the beguiling travelogue of a woman in exile: from her past, her ghosts, and herself. A nameless woman enters a hotel room. She’s been here once before. In the years since, the room hasn’t changed, but she has. Forever caught between check-in and check-out, she will go on to occupy other hotel rooms. Avignon to Oslo, Auckland to Austin, each as anonymous as the last but bound by rules of her choosing. There, amid the detritus of her travels, the matchbooks, cigarettes, keys and room-service wine, she negotiates with her memories, with the men she sometimes meets, with the clichés invented to aggravate middle-aged women, with those she has lost or left behind--and with what it might mean to return home. Urgent and immersive, filled with black humour and desire, McBride’s Strange Hotel is a novel of enduring emotional force.

A Novel

Emily Perkovich

This was a little difficult for me to stay engaged with. The actual writing was beautiful and I’m definitely interested in reading other titles from her. This also may have just been a bit too dense for my mushy stressed brain, so I may reread later.

Dreamy and dreamlike. Like listening to someone else's internal monologue and not understanding all of it, but somehow having it become entwined with your own. A bit opaque in patches, but perhaps that's the nature of dreams.

Laura Fisher

Hazel Evans

I took a while to get into this book but once I did I began to appreciate its genius and wanted to go back and read the whole thing again. I can recommend reading with “poetry eyes”. Eyes kind of half closed, so the words flow into your consciousness. Might help to get into the flow. I can also recommend reading in one sitting. I found it difficult to get back into that flow when I put it down and picked it up again.

Moray Lyle McIntosh

From the multi-award-winning author of the literary phenomenon A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, an exquisitely rendered and emotionally devastating meditation on love, loneliness, grief, and the possibilities for renewal. A nameless woman enters a non-descript hotel room she's been in once before, many years ago. Though the room hasn't changed, she has, as have the dimensions of her life. As she goes on to occupy a series of hotel rooms around the world -- each of which reflects back some aspect of herself -- we begin to piece together the details of what transpires in these rooms, the rules of engagements she's put in place for herself and the men she sometimes meets, and the outlines of the absence she is trying to forget. Gradually, we come to understand what it is the narrator seeks to contain within the anonymous rooms she is drawn to, and how she might become free. Told in a mesmerizing voice that will beguile readers with its fierceness, vulnerability, honesty, and black humour, Strange Hotel immerses us in the currents of attraction, love, and grief. It is an immensely moving and ultimately revelatory exploration of one woman's attempts to negotiate her own memories and impulses, and what it might mean to return home.

Strange Hotel

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