Walsh's writing has intellectual rigour and bags of formal bravery ... Hotel is a boldly intellectual work that repays careful reading. Its semiotic wordplay, circling prose and experimental form may prove a refined taste, but in its deft delineation of a complex modern phenomenon - and, perhaps, a modern malaise - it's a great success.

Financial Times

[A] slyly humorous and clever little book ... [Walsh moves] effortlessly and imaginatively from one thing to the next ... with utter conviction in each step. I loved Hotel and would read it again.

Marina Benjamin, New Statesman

A slim, sharp meditation on hotels and desire. ... Walsh invokes everyone from Freud to Forster to Mae West to the Marx Brothers. She's funny throughout, even as she documents the dissolution of her marriage and the peculiar brand of alienation on offer in lavish place.

The Paris Review

Evocative ... Walsh's strange, probing book is all the more affecting for eschewing easy resolution.

Publishers Weekly

Joanna Walsh is fast becoming one of our most important writers. Hotel is a dazzling tour de force of embodied ideas.

Deborah Levy, author of Black Vodka

Subtle and intriguing, this small book is an adventure in form. Part meditation on hotels, it mingles autobiography and reflections on home, secrets, and partings. Freud, Dora, Heidegger, and the Marx Brothers all have their moments on its small, intensely evocative stage.

Lisa Appignanesi, author of Trials of Passion