STRANGE HOTEL, Eimear McBride

Fog on the glass. She touches that and its cold shoots a fern up her arm.

A fern. The shape of frost. Immediately recognisable, yet made strange.

A woman visits hotels across the world, alone. Sometimes she has sex. Sometimes she doesn’t.

Her hard-won victories over the excellent carnage of being young.

What she’s doing, and why she’s doing it, is slowly revealed across the course of the book. The narrator is the mystery, and we are the detective. Even when she tries to cast herself as the detective in our eyes, we know she’s hiding something.

Anyone who’s travelled a bit recognises the aura of the anonymous hotel, the random hotel, the different yet stale hotel, the lie of the promise of the next hotel room. She captures that perfectly.

A sudden new light from behind casts her shadow out. His dreamt-of departure from the bathroom perhaps coming to pass – which is welcome news – but casts her outline monstrous onto the deserted streets of Prague.

“Casts her outline monstrous”: now that is someone who knows how to write a sentence, knowing the risk in that particular framing, and making it fucking glow with newness.

It is a hell of a performance, the slow unwinding of the bandages around one woman’s heart, and joyful as the last twist is pulled off. And the language of it is exquisite: sentences made strange, but happily providing of the keys to their rooms.

Twinkle twinkle there you are, a solitary life on an anomalous star

STRANGE HOTEL, Eimear McBride (UK) (US+)