EBOOK
About
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.
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.
Related Subjects
Reviews
"This book moved and provoked me in ways I can't fully articulate....Extraordinary."
Anna Paquin (True Blood)
"Astonishing… the novel speeds to a stunner of an ending, one that is both surprising, shocking, and even inevitable…. While we may never receive the name of the narrator, thanks to Stothard's prodigious gifts and richly woven novel, we come to know her -- and what we know is unforgettable."
Caroline Leavitt, The Boston Globe
"Stothard's prose is as lovely as it is lively… The Pink Hotel wisely and urgently illustrates the difficulty of truly knowing ourselves or anyone else."
The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)