Hotel world (2001)

One hotel night brings together five women, one of them the lingering spirit of a chambermaid who has died. Smith makes a commercial place of temporary residence hold strikingly unequal forms of belonging. The shared night is the meeting point; recollection and shifting tenses open other stretches of time around it. Choose this formally adventurous novel for the way different voices reveal how much a smooth public surface can conceal about the people who work in or pass through it.