Strange Hotel

By: Eimear McBride

Narrated by: Eimear McBride

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 listeners 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.

©2020 Eimear McBride (P)2020 McClelland & Stewart

Critic reviews

"No writer currently working excites me more than Eimear McBride - in her writing of the body, in her radical reimagining of the sentence, in her invention of new intimacies. Nothing else feels so fresh, so radically new. Strange Hotel challenges and expands my sense of what art can do. Each of McBride's novels feels like an event not just in English-language literature but in the English language itself." (Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness and What Belongs to You)