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Availability:
Only 4 left in stock, order soon!
Arrives
Friday, Jun 19
Description
BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • Forget room service: this is a riotous elegy, a deadpan celebration of colliding worlds, and a spirited defense of love. Blending incisive wit with surprising compassion, Hotel World is a wonderfully invigorating, life-affirming book. Five people: four are living; three are strangers; two are sisters; one, a teenage hotel chambermaid, has fallen to her death in a dumbwaiter. But her spirit lingers in the world, straining to recall things she never knew. And one night all five women find themselves in the smooth plush environs of the Global Hotel, where the intersection of their very different fates make for this playful, defiant, and richly inventive novel. Read more
Publisher : Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date : January 15, 2002
Edition : First Edition
Language : English
Print length : 257 pages
ISBN-10 : 0385722109
ISBN-13 : 00
Item Weight : 6.4 ounces
Dimensions : 5.2 x 0.5 x 8 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #476,404 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #3,825 in Women's Friendship Fiction #6,691 in Women's Domestic Life Fiction #17,524 in Literary Fiction (Books)
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Top Amazon Reviews
Format: Kindle
This is the best book I’ve read in a while! Totally loved it and will read Ali Smith’s other works.
Reviewed in the United States on March 28, 2018 by Nancy
Format: Paperback
This is an excellent book, even if you are not in to post-modernist stuff. The reading is sometimes tedious, although well worth the work. Smith is very abstract and brillant at capturing characters.
Reviewed in the United States on April 27, 2004 by Erin Pounders
Format: Paperback
This was the first book by Ali Smith I’ve read and honestly, the writing style was not for me. I’ve seen a lot of people love their works, but I don’t think I’ll be trying anything else.
Reviewed in the United States on September 13, 2023 by Emily Nosko
Format: Paperback
Good
Reviewed in the United States on January 30, 2024 by Baylee Mckeown
Format: Paperback
I really loved this, and it is the first Ali Smith novel I've read; at the moment it only has 3 stars, so I thought I'd try to raise its rating a bit. You do have to warm up to it, and all the reviewers who gave it one or two stars probably were expecting a typical popular fiction offering (entertaining/escapist), which it isn't. But if you don't expect that, I think you'll be drawn in if you give it a chance. It's not "experimental," either--a couple of the chapters are regular old stream-of-consciousness, which is especially effective for evoking the waterfall of grief the dead girl's sister is experiencing. Smith is brilliant at somehow making the accumulated weight of quotidian details of each life seem precious simply because they are lived, which is contrasted with the awareness of sensory detail slipping inexorably away from the consciousness of the dead girl. Very touching and makes the point that despite any pain or boredom any of us has in our individual life, being in the world corporeally is a precious gift.
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Reviewed in the United States on February 24, 2017 by Roxane Fletcher
Format: Paperback
Brilliant! But also a prime example of not judging a book by its cover. The cheery pink artwork and generic blurb about a "freak incident involving a dumb waiter" left me totally unprepared for the sorrow, isolation, and poignancy of the story within. The author utilizes an unusual narrative structure to describe her characters so vividly that I really felt for everyone involved in the story. Highly recommended.
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Reviewed in the United States on November 10, 2015 by Arpita Bose
Format: Paperback
As an author myself, I like to kind to other authors. But I feel like I must let readers know that, despite all the 5* reviews, this book is NOT for everyone. I usually only review books that I like a lot or love (4 or 5*s). This is not one of them. I kept rereading the review excerpts printed in the book because I could not figure out what the heck was going on. Supposedly, there are five characters. I couldn't tell them apart. I couldn't tell what was happening or what was real. Supposedly one of the character's sister died. Well, you could have fooled me. As an author, I should have been able to appreciate so so-called Avant Gard style of writing. I did not. I also did not appreciate page after page with NO punctuation. Just give me an old fashioned beginning, middle & end. Give me incidents somewhat in order. Give me a story arc. This one barely qualifies as a story. I'd love to understand why this book won these awards.
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Reviewed in the United States on April 28, 2025 by Sherrie Miranda
Format: Paperback
"Hotel World" can best be described as a book that 'haunts' you, from the first page, from the first paragraph, from the first word (which, amusingly, is 'wooooo-hoooo!'). Once picked up, it won't let you go until every word and idea is consumed, until the plot is exhausted. That, in my opinion, always makes a good read. "Hotel World" revolves around the tragic and untimely fate of a teenage swimmer, Sara, who plummets to her death in a dumb waiter. The first 'chapter' (if it can be called that; it's more of a vignette) begins with Sara's 'ghost', mislaid from her body, wandering the earth she has left and trying to make sense of it. The 'ghost' visits Sara's body in its coffin and begs it to give her insight into what happened on May 24th, the day she died. Sara's body explains that she had just fallen in love, suprisingly with a female employee of a watch shop, and that her fall in the dumb waiter had been a tragic accident: a £5 bet that went horribly wrong. If any of this sounds silly or hackneyed, it is the fault of my description only because Smith's writing is incredibly imaginative, insightful and unique. The melancholy theme of Sara's death is never over-played, and is conducted in a highly creative and contemporary manner. The strongest vignette in the book is that 'written' by Sara's younger sister, Clare. Although written in a somewhat baffling stream-of-consciousness style without punctuation, Clare's chapter is the most wonderfully evoking and emotional (without being too sentimental) account of grief I have ever read. Picking up tiny diamond-details with a fine-tooth comb, Ali Smith has an impossible eye for the subtle wonders of humanity: Clare, going to put onion peel in the rubbish bin, finds her sisters's swimming trophies in amongst the trash; she picks them out and tells her father that the rose bowl trophy has to be passed on to whoever wins the prize next year. Clare, remembering that dust is partial dead skin particles, keeps 'some of her sister' in a handkerchief in her top drawer, saving her sister from the hoover. The main body of the story is generated when Clare, dressed in Sara's spare uniform, goes to the Global Hotel and searches for the now hidden dumb waiter shaft, obsessed with finding out how many seconds it took the steel box to fall. She then unwittingly involves a cast of strangers who also play their part in the seamless beauty of "Hotel World": Penny, a bored and disenchanted journalist and Else, a homeless woman who is given a free room by the hotel receptionist, Lise, who is sick and tired and wants to rebel about the corporate chain, Global Hotels. They are all linked in some way, as Smith stitches an engaging and colourful patchwork of death, hope and the endurance of love. I read Smith's novel in around 4 or 5 hours; it was impossible to stop or delay finishing it because the characters, and the world they weaved, just captivated me. "Hotel World" leaves you feeling full and empty at the same time, enriched, confused, happy, futile, and -- if you're a writer -- jealous and frustrated. Her talents are enviable. The descriptions, visions and observations she uses in her book are profound, but never ficticious or pretentious. I must admit that I cringed slightly at the idea of a well-paid style writer and a homeless woman who collect pennies and wraps newspaper around her boots joining together to help a young girl, and by any other writer the story would seem false and preachy, but in Smith's hands it is true, tentative and remarkable. It is clear why this book was nominated for the Booker Prize and the Orange Fiction Prize, the calibre of writing is fantastic- although I wouldn't actively recommend it to anyone who finds anything other than the classic beginning-middle-end novel structure challenging, as it's fragmented style maybe be a bit too brave for the tastes of some.
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Reviewed in the United States on May 15, 2003 by girlshapedlove