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  • Published: 28 July 2026
  • ISBN: 9781405980722
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $28.00

Hotel World




A masterful, exuberant novel from the Booker Prize-shortlisted, Women's Prize-winning author of How to be both and the critically acclaimed Seasonal quartet - featuring a new preface from the author to mark 25 years since publication

Five people: four are living, three are strangers, two are sisters, one is dead. In her highly acclaimed and ambitious book, the brilliant 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 . . .

  • Published: 28 July 2026
  • ISBN: 9781405980722
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $28.00

About the author

Ali Smith

Ali Smith's works of fiction include the novel Hotel World, which was short-listed for both the Orange Prize and the Booker Prize and won the Encore Award and the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award, and The Accidental, which won the Whitbread Award and was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction. Her story collections include Free Love, which won a Saltire Society First Book of the Year Award and a Scottish Arts Council Award, The Whole Story and Other Stories, and How to be Both, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction in 2015. Born in Inverness, Scotland, Smith lives in Cambridge, England.

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Praise for Hotel World

Ali Smith has got style, ideas and punch. Read her

Jeanette Winterson