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Picador
April 2010
On Sale: March 30, 2010
176 pages
ISBN: 0312425244
EAN: 9780312425241
Hardcover
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Fiction
A tale of twisted love, from the author of The Diving Pool
and The Housekeeper and the Professor
In a crumbling seaside hotel on the coast of Japan, quiet
seventeen-year-old Mari works the front desk as her mother
tends to the off-season customers. When one night they are
forced to expel a middle-aged man and a prostitute from
their room, Mari finds herself drawn to the man's voice, in
what will become the first gesture of a single long
seduction. In spite of her provincial surroundings, and
her cool but controlling mother, Mari is a sophisticated
observer of human desire, and she sees in this man
something she has long been looking for.
The man is a proud if threadbare translator living on an
island off the coast. A widower, there are whispers around
town that he may have murdered his wife. Mari begins to
visit him on his island, and he soon initiates her into a
dark realm of both pain and pleasure, a place in which she
finds herself more at ease even than the translator. As
Mari's mother begins to close in on the affair, Mari's
sense of what is suitable and what is desirable are
recklessly engaged.
Hotel Iris is a stirring novel about the sometimes violent
ways in which we express intimacy and about the
untranslatable essence of love.
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