Hotel World [suggested by Helen Close]

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 . . . [product description from Amazon]

The book has its own Wikipedia page.

Author’s Wikipedia page.

Shortlisted for this month

For this month, Helen’s other choices were:

The Shipping News

Annie Proulx’s highly acclaimed, international bestseller and Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Quoyle is a hapless, hopeless hack journalist living and working in New York. When his no-good wife is killed in a spectacular road accident, Quoyle heads for the land of his forefathers — the remotest corner of far-flung Newfoundland. With ‘the aunt’ and his delinquent daughters — Bunny and Sunshine — in tow, Quoyle finds himself part of an unfolding, exhilarating Atlantic drama. ‘The Shipping News’ is an irresistible comedy of human life and possibility. [product description from Amazon]

The book has its own Wikipedia page, and has also been made into a film, which has an entry on Wikipedia too.

Author’s Wikipedia page.
Author’s biog notes on the publisher’s website.

A Spool of Blue Thread

‘It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon…’

This is the way Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she and Red fell in love that summer’s day in 1959. The whole family on the porch, half-listening as their mother tells the same tale they have heard so many times before.

From that porch we spool back through the generations, witnessing the events, secrets and unguarded moments that have come to define the family. From Red’s father and mother, newly arrived in Baltimore in the 1920s, to Abby and Red’s grandchildren carrying the family legacy boisterously into the twenty-first century — four generations of Whitshanks, their lives unfolding in and around the sprawling, lovingly worn Baltimore house that has always been their home… [product description from Amazon]

Completing the hat-trick, this last book of the month also has its own Wikipedia page.