Hotel 21
The 'funny, poignant and completely heart-warming' debut novel
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- €9.99
Publisher Description
'Beautifully told, this is a heart-warming and thought-provoking read.' Heat
'A sharp, funny, poignant and completely heart-warming story about female friendship and kick-ass women. I truly loved it!' Ruth Hogan
'I have a first-day rule. Any sign of trouble, even a whiff of a problem, and I walk.'
Noelle is an efficient and friendly hotel cleaner, a model employee. Or so she'd have you think. The trouble is that she can't help taking little 'souvenirs' as she cleans. Nothing of value, just tokens of happy, normal lives: a lipstick, a hair clip, some tweezers. And by the time the guest has noticed, she's long gone.
As she starts at her 21st hotel, she's determined to beat her record of one month in a five star hotel before suspicion falls on her. But when she meets her new colleagues, her plans are complicated. These women aren't just hands pushing carts down lonely hotel corridors: they are women with lives full of happiness and worry, pain and joy. The kind of lives Noelle has never known how to live. They make her wonder what it might be like to have real friends, people to stick around for…
Will the women at Hotel 21 give her the courage to claim the life she deserves, or will her old habits come back to haunt her?
'Wonderful!' Daily Mail
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
At the centre of this humour-filled story about connection is Noelle–who, between her itinerant existence working in hotels around the country and her lack of family ties, has little of it. Where she does find a way of linking her own life to others’, as well as getting an adrenaline rush, is in the act of stealing from the guests whose rooms she cleans. To get away with this, she must keep her fellow cleaners on side, prepared to defend her when an accusation is made. So she is forever playing a character she thinks they might warm to, and keeping them at arm’s length in the process. That is until her 21st hotel, where the team of women around her refuse to be anything other than real friends to the real her, however complicated that might make matters. As her tale, a stirring celebration of community, unfolds, the reader–who understands who Noelle really is, what she is doing and why–will find her extremely easy to root for too.
