The latest addition to my website is Ali Smith‘s Hotel World. This tells the stories of five women all associated in some way with the Global Hotel, located in an unspecified UK city. The story starts with the ghost of a chambermaid who was killed on the second day on the job when she got into the dumb waiter, which could not hold her weight. We also meet a homeless woman begging outside the hotel, a receptionist, a guest and the younger sister of the dead woman. All have issues, none seem happy and none seem to have any friend and none seem to be in romantic relationship. Their interactions and their struggles with life, told in a fairly post-modernist manner, are superbly portrayed by Ali Smith in this novel.