Ali Smith's masterful, ambitious Hotel World was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Orange Prize. Five people: four are living, three are strangers, two are sisters, one is dead. In her highly acclaimed and most ambitious book to date, the brilliant young Scottish writer Ali Smith brings alive five unforgettable characters and traces their intersecting lives. This is a short novel with big themes (time, chance, money, death) but an eye for tiny detail: the taste of dust, the weight of a few coins in the hand, the pleasurable pain of a stone in one's shoe . . . 'Ali Smith has got style, ideas and punch. Read her' Jeanette Winterson 'An extremely readable, easy-flowing writer and one of the subtlest and most intelligent around. Hotel World is essential reading from a writer confirming herself as a major talent. . . a wonderful piece of sustained imagination' Independent 'As infectious as a pop song, the story bursts open form the very first page and demands to be read in one sitting' The Times