From the winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction
'Powerful . . . truly a living and breathing thing.' Financial Times
'McBride is on blistering form.' Sinéad Gleeson
'Nothing else feels so fresh, so radically new.' Garth Greenwell
'An emotionally enchanting novel that gets deep under the skin.' Dazed
A woman enters an Avignon hotel room. She's been here once before - but while the room hasn't changed, she is a different person now.
Forever caught between check-in and check-out, she will go on to occupy other hotel rooms, from Prague to Oslo, Auckland to Austin, each as anonymous as the last. There, amid the open suitcases, the matchbooks, cigarettes, keys and room-service wine, she will negotiate with memory, with the men she sometimes meets, and with what it might mean to return home.
Review
'Nothing else feels so fresh, so radically new.' - Garth Greenwell
'An emotionally enchanting novel that gets deep under the skin.' Dazed
Review
Strange Hotel already has the stamp of immortality on it. A deep dissection of desire and aloneness, in its familiarity and strangeness, it seems even newer and more radical than McBride's previous novels. As Anne Enright has said, she is something of a genius. -- Sebastian Barry
Her words and characters squirrel their way into your soul . . . Magnetic and fascinating. - Stylist
Richly written, and wholly absorbing. - Daily Telegraph
Mesmeric. Strange Hotel crackles with a bone-dry humour and a crisp intelligence that relieves its melancholy and lightens its load. the supple rhythms of McBride's prose carry their own cargo of exhilaration. - The Arts Desk
No one in contemporary fiction can capture what McBride can: the rich, sometimes excruciating, often humiliating, intimacy of a thought. - The Skinny
A devastating portrait of a mind stuck inside itself, for whom the hotel room is both oblivion and sanctuary. - Scotland on Sunday
Absorbing, McBride's linguistic acrobatics [are] sinuous and beguiling. - Herald
Book Description
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.
About the Author
Eimear McBride grew up in the west of Ireland and trained at Drama Centre London. Her first novel A Girl is a Half-formed Thingtook nine years to find a publisher and subsequently received a number of awards, including the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, and the Goldsmiths Prize. Her second novel The Lesser Bohemianswon the 2017 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award. In 2017 she was awarded the inaugural Creative Fellowship of the Beckett Research Centre, University of Reading. In a 2018 Times Literary Supplement poll of 200 critics, academics, and fiction writers, McBride was named one of the ten best British and Irish novelists writing today. Strange Hotel is McBride's third novel.