Strange Hotel

'McBride is on blistering form.' Sinéad Gleeson At the mid-point of her life 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, but bound by rules of her choosing. There, amid the detritus of her travels, 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. 'Nothing else feels so fresh, so radically new. Strange Hotel challenges and expands my sense of what art can do.' Garth Greenwell

Eimear McBride is the author of four novels: A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, The Lesser Bohemians, Strange Hotel and The City Changes Its Face. She held the inaugural Creative Fellowship at the Beckett Research Centre, University of Reading and is the recipient of the Women's Prize for Fiction, Goldsmiths Prize, Kerry Prize, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.