Hotel Honolulu

'Nothing to me is so erotic as a hotel room, and therefore so penetrated with life and death. Buddy Hamstra offered me a hotel job in Honolulu and laughed at my accepting it so quickly. I had been trying to find a new life, as people do when they flee to distant paradises; Hawaii was paradise nibbled by rats.' In Paul Theroux's latest novel, the newly married 49-year-old narrator, exiled from his old life elsewhere and his former profession of writing, is drawn into the chaotic lives of his guests and into the distinctive customs and rhythms of the distant island. As witness to the many contrasting, and often ribald, chronicles of the hotel's characters, he ultimately finds personal salvation through returning to writing once again. The result is this novel in eighty distinct episodes, a Chaucerian sequence of strange pilgrims and just-as-strange islanders confronting each other, and their fate, in the rooms of the seedy hotel. HOTEL HONOLULU is funny, tragic and touching, full of sex and love and death. This is Hawaii as it has never been written about before, but it is also the heart of America.