"Hotel World" - shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction 2001 - by Ali Smith, award-winning Scottish author of "The Accidental", intimately explores the lives of five women connected by one hotel. The kind of novel that is as rare as good room service, Ali Smith's "Hotel World" is a passionate, funny, serious, captivating glimpse into the lives for five people connected to one ranch of the ubiquitous Global Hotel chain. Brought together - and forced apart - by a bizarre incident involving a dumb waiter, we share their very different experiences of life in the aftermath of death, of pain and sorrow, of hope and love - everything, in fact, that the world dares to throw at us. "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"). The award-winning Ali Smith is one of the most talented modern British writers; her novels, "The Accidental and There but for the", and her collections of short stories, "Other Stories and Other Stories", "The First Person and Other Stories" and "The Whole Story and Other Stories", are available in Penguin paperback.