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 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.