From the multiple award-winning author of the literary phenomenon A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, a meditation on grief, memory, desire, and the possibilities for renewal

A woman estranged from her past takes refuge in hotel rooms. She's a permanent guest, lodged between arrival and departure, her suitcase a finely tuned instrument with only the essentials. Adrift across far-flung cities, she memorizes the litany of transit: the matchbooks and cigarettes, skeleton keys, chandeliers, solitary meals, the men she seduces with lines she's rehearsed. Between trysts with strangers, under the glow of the television, she wills her mind to go blank. Because something looms in the corners of her chambers, larger than a shadow. A voice demands to be listened to: the call of those she left behind, including herself.

Eimear McBride's Strange Hotel is a portrait of female loneliness, of one woman's refusal to yield to demands made of aging mothers, wives, and widows. At turns erudite, devastating, and morbidly funny, McBride's language will seep into your mind, compressed as the dwellings she describes.