Lost Girls and Love Hotels

"Sitting down on the heated toilet seat, I light a smoke and take out my mobile phone. I've always believed that rituals are for f.....-up people with slippery grasps on reality. This is my latest ritual: each time I sit down on the toilet, I listen to the two-saved message. "

Ferociously cool and darkly comic, Lost Girls and Love Hotels introduces a talented and original new voice in fiction. Catherine Hanrahan's poignant debut novel is an unforgettable anarchic and off-the-wall portrait of loneliness and redemption, as seen through the neon glare of Tokyo.

Working at an air hostess training academy, Margaret is doing everything in her power to forget home, and Tokyo's exotic underworld-teeming with drink, drug and three-hour love hotels- enables her to keep her demons at bay. Her self-destructive quest stalls, however, as she becomes increasingly haunted by images of a Western girl missing in Tokyo. The easiness of disappearing in such a city is brought to the fore when Margaret's affair with an enigmatic gangster ignites a possibly tragic chain of events.

Infused with realism, displacement and allure, Lost Girls and Love Hotels is essential reading for anyone who has dreamt of travelling and living in a foreign city!

Catherine Hanrahanwas born in Montreal and has lived in England, Thailand and Japan. Her fiction has appeared in Zoe All-Story Extra and Open City. Lost Girls and Love Hotels is Hanrahan's first novel.

Simon and Schuster
Author: Catherine Hanrahan
ISBN: 9781416522478
Price: $21.95