A brilliant, formally restless novel about a death in a hotel and the lives that keep moving around its absence.

A young chambermaid falls down a dumbwaiter shaft; from there the book fractures into multiple voices, times, griefs, hauntings, desires, and states of consciousness. The hotel becomes less a setting than a machine for passing lives through one another: guests, staff, strangers, the dead, the barely noticed, the people whose labour keeps everything appearing smooth.

It’s one of Smith’s great early works: playful, sad, strange, and structurally alive without feeling like a trick. The book moves between ghost story, social novel, linguistic experiment, queer desire, grief comedy, and critique of service-world invisibility. Very good for readers of Jeanette Winterson, A. L. Kennedy, Deborah Levy, Virginia Woolf, Muriel Spark, and novels that understand that form is not decoration but a way of thinking.

Penguin paperback edition, published in Penguin Books in 2002. First published by Hamish Hamilton in 2001. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction 2001, as noted on the cover. Good second-hand condition.