The Girl In The Hotel

Welcome to the secluded Hotel Or, deep in the jungles of coastal Mexico. The hotel is a criminal money-making machine, a sausage grinder processing elderly retirees for their savings and pensions. In walks Ed 'Never Ever Eddie' Rang, a young and resourceful fourteen-year-old girl, who first explores the deadly hotel before being trapped in its claws. She is up against the hotel's owner, Constance Snapp, a cruel and clever megalomaniac with a deadly clan of gypsies assisting in her evil and murderous profiteering. The hotel is rife with murderous misfits and its permanent residents, an assortment of wealthy recluses, some still sane, others as dangerous and mad as the hotel owner. Ed teams up with Kazu Danser, a twelve-year-old Niños Asesino (Child Assassin) on the run from the Federales. Together, the two are hell-bent on destroying the hotel and its menagerie of ghastly crimes. Vengeance fires their young hearts as they wade deeper into the mysteries of the hotel. Lives need to be saved. The Hotel Or needs to be closed down. Permanently. Can they put the wrench to the machine, killing it forever? Can they survive?

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography The prizewinning memoir of one of the world’s great writers, about coming of age as an enemy of the people and finding her voice in Stalinist Russia Born across the street from the Kremlin in the opulent Metropol Hotel—the setting of the New York Times bestselling novel A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles—Ludmilla Petrushevskaya grew up in a family of Bolshevik intellectuals who were reduced in the wake of the Russian Revolution to waiting in bread lines. In The Girl from the Metropol Hotel, her prizewinning memoir, she recounts her childhood of extreme deprivation—of wandering the streets like a young Edith Piaf, singing for alms, and living by her wits like Oliver Twist, a diminutive figure far removed from the heights she would attain as an internationally celebrated writer. As she unravels the threads of her itinerant upbringing—of feigned orphandom, of sleeping in freight cars and beneath the dining tables of communal apartments, of the fugitive pleasures of scraps of food—we see, both in her remarkable lack of self-pity and in the two dozen photographs throughout the text, her feral instinct and the crucible in which her gift for giving voice to a nation of survivors was forged. “From heartrending facts Petrushevskaya concocts a humorous and lyrical account of the toughest childhood and youth imaginable. . . . It [belongs] alongside the classic stories of humanity’s beloved plucky child heroes: Edith Piaf, Charlie Chaplin, the Artful Dodger, Gavroche, David Copperfield. . . . The child is irresistible and so is the adult narrator who creates a poignant portrait from the rags and riches of her memory.” —Anna Summers, from the Introduction

Detective Mary Joe Court sleeps with a shotgun beside her bed and a lovable bullmastiff at her feet. For the past twelve years, she's hidden from a nightmarish past, but with every passing day, her scars fade and her heart grows lighter. Now, for the first time in her life, she looks forward to her future. She's happy. Then she finds the body. Someone shot the victim in her chest and left her to die in a cheap motel. Joe knew her well. She grew up with her. They were sisters, of a sort. Twelve years ago, the victim put a gangster in prison. Now that gangster's out and he's looking to settle scores--Joe included. Joe has fought to leave her past behind. Now she has to face it or lose everything she cares about. Because the killer hunting her will tear apart her carefully constructed life piece by piece until there's nothing left. Unless Joe gets him first...

Welcome to the secluded Hotel Or, deep in the jungles of coastal Mexico. The hotel is a criminal money-making machine, a sausage grinder processing elderly retirees for their savings and pensions. In walks Ed 'Never Ever Eddie' Rang, a young and resourceful fourteen-year-old girl, who first explores the deadly hotel before being trapped in its claws. She is up against the hotel's owner, Constance Snapp, a cruel and clever megalomaniac with a deadly clan of gypsies assisting in her evil and murderous profiteering. The hotel is rife with murderous misfits and its permanent residents, an assortment of wealthy recluses, some still sane, others as dangerous and mad as the hotel owner. Ed teams up with Kazu Danser, a twelve-year-old Niños Asesino (Child Assassin) on the run from the Federales. Together, the two are hell-bent on destroying the hotel and its menagerie of ghastly crimes. Vengeance fires their young hearts as they wade deeper into the mysteries of the hotel. Lives need to be saved. The Hotel Or needs to be closed down. Permanently. Can they put the wrench to the machine, killing it forever? Can they survive?

Ali Smith's masterful, ambitious Hotel World was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Orange Prize. 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 . . . 'Ali Smith has got style, ideas and punch. Read her' Jeanette Winterson 'An extremely readable, easy-flowing writer and one of the subtlest and most intelligent around. Hotel World is essential reading from a writer confirming herself as a major talent. . . a wonderful piece of sustained imagination' Independent 'As infectious as a pop song, the story bursts open form the very first page and demands to be read in one sitting' The Times

LONGLISTED FOR THE ORANGE PRIZE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE "This book moved and provoked me in ways I can't fully articulate....Extraordinary."—Anna Paquin (True Blood) A seventeen-year-old girl pieces together the mystery of her mother's life and death among the bars and bedrooms of Los Angeles in this dazzling debut novel. A raucous, drug-fueled party has taken over a boutique hotel on Venice Beach—it's a memorial for Lily, the now-deceased, free-spirited proprietress of the place. Little do the attendees know that Lily's estranged daughter—and the nameless narrator of this striking novel—is among them, and she has just walked off with a suitcase of Lily's belongings. Abandoned by Lily many years ago, she has come a long way to learn about her mother, and the stolen suitcase—stuffed with clothes, letters, and photographs—contains not only a history of her mother's love life, but perhaps also the key to her own identity. As the tough, resourceful narrator tracks down her mother's former husbands, boyfriends, and acquaintances, a risky reenactment of her life begins to unfold. Lily had a knack for falling in love with the wrong people, and one man, a fashion photographer turned paparazzo, has begun to work his sinuous charms on the young woman. Told with high style and noirish flare, Anna Stothard's The Pink Hotel is a powerfully evocative debut novel about wish fulfillment, reckless impulse, and how we discover ourselves.

"Sentimental, heartfelt….the exploration of Henry’s changing relationship with his family and with Keiko will keep most readers turning pages...A timely debut that not only reminds readers of a shameful episode in American history, but cautions us to examine the present and take heed we don’t repeat those injustices."-- Kirkus Reviews “A tender and satisfying novel set in a time and a place lost forever, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet gives us a glimpse of the damage that is caused by war--not the sweeping damage of the battlefield, but the cold, cruel damage to the hearts and humanity of individual people. Especially relevant in today's world, this is a beautifully written book that will make you think. And, more importantly, it will make you feel." -- Garth Stein, New York Times bestselling author of The Art of Racing in the Rain “Jamie Ford's first novel explores the age-old conflicts between father and son, the beauty and sadness of what happened to Japanese Americans in the Seattle area during World War II, and the depths and longing of deep-heart love. An impressive, bitter, and sweet debut.” -- Lisa See, bestselling author of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan In the opening pages of Jamie Ford’s stunning debut novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, Henry Lee comes upon a crowd gathered outside the Panama Hotel, once the gateway to Seattle’s Japantown. It has been boarded up for decades, but now the new owner has made an incredible discovery: the belongings of Japanese families, left when they were rounded up and sent to internment camps during World War II. As Henry looks on, the owner opens a Japanese parasol. This simple act takes old Henry Lee back to the 1940s, at the height of the war, when young Henry’s world is a jumble of confusion and excitement, and to his father, who is obsessed with the war in China and having Henry grow up American. While “scholarshipping” at the exclusive Rainier Elementary, where the white kids ignore him, Henry meets Keiko Okabe, a young Japanese American student. Amid the chaos of blackouts, curfews, and FBI raids, Henry and Keiko forge a bond of friendship–and innocent love–that transcends the long-standing prejudices of their Old World ancestors. And after Keiko and her family are swept up in the evacuations to the internment camps, she and Henry are left only with the hope that the war will end, and that their promise to each other will be kept. Forty years later, Henry Lee is certain that the parasol belonged to Keiko. In the hotel’s dark dusty basement he begins looking for signs of the Okabe family’s belongings and for a long-lost object whose value he cannot begin to measure. Now a widower, Henry is still trying to find his voice–words that might explain the actions of his nationalistic father; words that might bridge the gap between him and his modern, Chinese American son; words that might help him confront the choices he made many years ago. Set during one of the most conflicted and volatile times in American history, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is an extraordinary story of commitment and enduring hope. In Henry and Keiko, Jamie Ford has created an unforgettable duo whose story teaches us of the power of forgiveness and the human heart. BONUS: This edition contains a Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet discussion guide and an excerpt from Jamie Ford's Love and Other Consolation Prizes.

From the two-time Giller Prize shortlisted author, a dazzling circus of a novel set in the seductive underside of Montreal and New York between the wars Two babies are abandoned in a Montreal orphanage in the winter of 1910. One is a girl named Rose; the other, a boy named Pierrot. Each display rare gifts that bring them adoration and hatred. As they are made to travel around the city performing clown routines to raise funds for the orphanage, they make plans for a sensational future. They are separated as teenagers and sent off to work as menial servants, but both soon find themselves escaping into the criminal world, participating in the vicious and absurd and perverted underbelly of Montreal and New York City between the wars. They search for each other, and one night, under the snowflakes, they reunite, and the underworld will never look quite the same. With all the storytelling skill and magical language for which she is known, Heather O’Neill dazzles us with a new tale of motherless gangsters, drug addicted pianists, radicalized chorus girls and a city whose economy hinges on the price of a kiss.