Product Description

Ali Smith's innovative, extraordinary new novel checks us into the smooth, plush world of the Global - but is it really the kind of place you want to spend the rest of your life in?

Hotel World takes us through a night in the lives of five people. Three are strangers, two are sisters, one is dead. Through the course of the evening we are drawn into their different worlds. It's luxurious for some, but a long drop for others.

Playful, defiant and richly inventive, Hotel World is a riotous elegy, a deadpan celebration, an alchemy of opposite worlds colliding to make a modern parable of connection and indifference, and ultimately a defence of love.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #99307 in Books
• Published on: 2002-04-25
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Five disparate voices inhabit Ali Smith's dreamlike, mesmerising Hotel World, set in the luxurious anonymity of the Global Hotel, in an unnamed northern English city. The disembodied yet interconnected characters include Sara, a 19-year-old chambermaid who has recently died at the hotel; her bereaved sister, Clare, who visits the scene of Sara's death; Penny, an advertising copywriter who is staying in the room opposite; Lise, the Global's depressed receptionist; and the homeless Else who begs on the street outside. Smith's ambitious prose explores all facets of language and its uses. Sara takes us through the moment of her exit from the world and beyond; in her desperate, fading grip on words and senses she gropes to impart the meaning of her death in what she terms "the lift for dishes"--then comes a flash of clarity: "That's the name for it, the name for it; that's it; dumb waiter dumb waiter dumb waiter." Blended with hers are other voices: Penny's bland journalese and Else's obsession with metaphysical poetry.

Hotel World is not an easy read: disturbing and witty by turns, with its stream-of-consciousness narrators reminiscent of Virgina Woolf's The Waves, its deceptively rambling language is underpinned by a formal construction. Exploring the "big themes" of love, death and millennial capitalism, it takes as its starting point Muriel Spark's Momento Mori ("Remember you must die") and counteracts this axiom with a resolute "Remember you must live". Ali Smith's novel is a daring, compelling, and frankly spooky read. --Catherine Taylor

Synopsis
Five people: four are living, three are strangers, two are sisters, one is dead. In her highly acclaimed and most ambitious book to date, the brilliant young Scottish writer Ali Smith brings alive five unforgettable characters and traces their intersecting lives. This is a short novel with big themes (time, chance, money, death) but an eye for tiny detail: the taste of dust, the weight of a few coins in the hand, the pleasurable pain of a stone in one's shoe...

About the Author
Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962 and lives in Cambridge. Her first collection of stories, Free Love, won the Saltire Scottish First Book Award and a Scottish Arts Council Award in 1995. Her first novel, Like, was published in 1997, and her second collection of stories, Other Stories and Other Stories, in 1999.

Customer Reviews

Brilliant...
I loved Hotel World; it's a truly brilliant book that made me feel lucky to be alive. Ali Smith has a writing style that's beautiful, original, but most strikingly, incredibly warm, and full of hope. Buy this book!

Ulysses Lite
Very derivative, I thought. Although it is well-written, and I did like the first chapter. I thought it should have been left on its own as a short story.

Woooo Hoooo
Wooooo Hooooo - anouncement to everyone: this novel is absolutely appallling and I am being polite. It actually made me incredibly angry because I felt that the author has no respect for the literary form on the novel and is hiding the fact she has nothing to say and no story behind her supposedly inventive writing.