Pink Hotel

LONGLISTED FOR THE ORANGE PRIZE

NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS'' CHOICE

"This book moved and provoked me in ways I can''t fully articulate....Extraordinary."—Anna Paquin (True Blood)

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.