
Critic Reviews
Good
Based on 17 reviews on

From Eimear McBride, author of the award-winning A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, comes the beguiling travelogue of a woman in exile: from her past, her ghosts, and herself.
A nameless woman enters a hotel room. She's been here once before. In the years since, the room hasn't changed, but she has. Forever caught between check-in and check-out, she will go on to occupy other hotel rooms. From Avignon to Oslo, Auckland to Austin, each is 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 negotiates with her memories, with the men she sometimes meets, with the clichés invented to aggravate middle-aged women, with those she has lost or left behind--and with what it might mean to return home. Urgent and immersive, filled with black humour and desire, McBride's Strange Hotel is a novel of enduring emotional force."Ms. McBride arrived as an indie-press phenom in 2013 with "A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing," a jagged, uncompromising stream-of-consciousness novel that she shopped for nine years before finding a publisher . . . The baroque tangle of the main character's 'inverted chats, ' as she dubs her monologues, is more interesting than yet another plainspoken confrontation with repressed trauma. Ms. McBride's brilliance lies in her arrangements of the glorious garble of language."
--Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal