Hotel Iris

By Yoko Ogawa,

Book cover of Hotel Iris

Book description

A tale of twisted love from Yoko Ogawa―author of The Diving Pool and The Housekeeper and the Professor.

In a crumbling seaside hotel on the coast of Japan, quiet seventeen-year-old Mari works the front desk as her mother tends to the off-season customers. When one night they are forced to…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Hotel Iris as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

This book is a compelling and, at times, shockingly revealing story of a love that cannot be, should not be, but is. 

Seventeen-year-old Mari, after an altercation at the hotel where she works, becomes involved with the perpetrator of it, a much older man of, to all but Mari, unacceptable morals. Through its unsparingly graphic depiction of the lovers’ sometimes extreme but mutual intimacies, Ogawa’s novel navigates the rarely explored region between violence and impassioned love.

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