by Ali Smith
First published 2001
A single moment of fatal slippage sends Sara Wilby tumbling from a hotel's upper floor, her body broken on the street below. But death doesn't stop her story. Her ghost lingers in the Global Hotel, watching her younger sister and tracking the lives of strangers connected by this single building: a homeless woman, a hotel clerk, a journalist. Each character moves through the hotel's stark rooms and corridors, their intimate moments of loss, connection, and survival intersecting in unexpected ways. As Sara observes the living, she reconstructs the circumstances of her own death and the complex web of human vulnerability that surrounds her. What emerges is a kaleidoscopic portrait of contemporary life, where chance encounters and quiet desperation reveal something profound about human connection.
Genres: fiction, drama, literary-fiction, contemporary, 21st-century, contemporary-romance
Vibes: atmospheric, emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: ghost, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Global Hotel
Period: 21st-century
256 pages · Paperback · Hamish Hamilton