Here are 100 books that Hotel Iris fans have personally recommended if you like
Hotel Iris.
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I was born and grew up in Seoul. My bestselling debut novel has been longlisted for the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction and the 2024 Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize and shortlisted for the 2024 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. My book is inspired by my great-aunt, one of the oldest women who had escaped alone from North Korea. It is available from Harper Perennial in the U.S. and Virago in the UK. The novel’s translations continue to meet readers worldwide, including in Italy, Romania, Greece, Denmark, Spain, Switzerland, and South Korea.
Eileen is one of the most twisted and unconventional literary heroines I’ve ever read. Behind her quiet demeanor and dull face hides her mind, which is like a killer’s, always furious and seething.
While working at a juvenile correctional facility, Eileen meets Rebecca, another key character far removed from most women of their generation. Seductive and deceitful, Rebecca cajoles Eileen into joining her act of crime–a violent, underhanded plan to restore her idea of justice.
Shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize and chosen by David Sedaris as his recommended book for his Fall 2016 tour.
So here we are. My name was Eileen Dunlop. Now you know me. I was twenty-four years old then, and had a job that paid fifty-seven dollars a week as a kind of secretary at a private juvenile correctional facility for teenage boys. I think of it now as what it really was for all intents and purposes-a prison for boys. I will call it Moorehead. Delvin Moorehead was a terrible landlord I had years later, and so to…
Murder mysteries, thrillers, whodunnits, all in the context of the "Indian," or Native American, experience, that's my subject. But really I'm writing about family and friends. Love letters to a people and life. My mother's father was native, and I lived and worked near and on two reservations growing up, White Earth and Red Lake. My novel, for example, was written out of my experience of being a hunting/fishing guide for Sabaskong Bay Lodge. My current work, about the Indian Boarding School genocide, has been inspired by first-person witness to that atrocity.
Subversive, edifying, and laugh-out-loud funny, Yeatman’s satirical novel follows Victoria, a woman in a failing marriage, from her initial fantasies of dispatching her clueless husband to the act itself. And no less employing the necessary help of her too-sweet and clueless gal-pal, Holly.
A book about a bookworm, Victoria, it contains countless Easter Eggs and riffs on some of the greats while spinning out a wholly engaging and, by all means, original and captivating story.
“Imagine if Patricia Highsmith had written The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and instead of heroic daydreams she gave her protagonist murderous ones—that would be Bookworm. Robin Yeatman’s story is subversive, surprising, and satisfying in a way that only the best comic noir can be.”—Claire Oshetsky, author of Chouette
A wickedly funny debut novel—a black comedy with a generous heart that explores the power of imagination and reading—about a woman who tries to use fiction to find her way to happiness.
Victoria is unhappily married to an ambitious and controlling lawyer consumed with his career. Burdened with overbearing in-laws, a…
Murder mysteries, thrillers, whodunnits, all in the context of the "Indian," or Native American, experience, that's my subject. But really I'm writing about family and friends. Love letters to a people and life. My mother's father was native, and I lived and worked near and on two reservations growing up, White Earth and Red Lake. My novel, for example, was written out of my experience of being a hunting/fishing guide for Sabaskong Bay Lodge. My current work, about the Indian Boarding School genocide, has been inspired by first-person witness to that atrocity.
A tour de force thriller set in Paris, this book assembles, through a mysterious observer, a disparate and culturally rich cast of characters, all of whom, ultimately, converge over an act of terrorism.
The book's beauty is in its finely nuanced and richly sympathetic portrayal of otherwise marginalized individuals, the Witch, the tale-teller, being one of them. It has brilliant execution, is sly, mysterious at times, and profound.
The Witch of Matongé by Madison Smartt Bell, Concord Free Press, 2022, 258 pages. ISBN 978-0-9835851-8-3 The first thing that will strike you about Madison Smartt Bell’s new novel, The Witch of Matongé, is the beautiful language. This is not a typical narrative. It is startling, and the depth of what is described is thrilling. In the beginning, the viewpoint appears to be omniscient. However, the witch of the novel’s title is actually narrating and her unique manner of speaking is exquisite. She uses a bowl of water to understand what is happening in order to tell the story. And…
Murder mysteries, thrillers, whodunnits, all in the context of the "Indian," or Native American, experience, that's my subject. But really I'm writing about family and friends. Love letters to a people and life. My mother's father was native, and I lived and worked near and on two reservations growing up, White Earth and Red Lake. My novel, for example, was written out of my experience of being a hunting/fishing guide for Sabaskong Bay Lodge. My current work, about the Indian Boarding School genocide, has been inspired by first-person witness to that atrocity.
A sensation in France and elsewhere in Europe, David Vann is a writer of brutally unsparing narratives. This book, one of his best, surprises, shocks, and horrifies—and sometimes amuses, too—and all at once.
It is a story about a family on what should be nothing more than a hunting trip. Only after a senseless murder, it becomes a meditation on the power of myth. The story is as real as real gets, though it’s far larger than that. It becomes the stuff of revelatory—and prophetic—nightmares. It’s a big dark dream of a book, unforgettable.
A shocking, suspenseful and daring new novel from one of the greatest American writers at work today, whose previous books include Caribou Island, Dirt and Legend of a Suicide.
In David Vann's searing novel Goat Mountain, an eleven-year-old boy is eager to make his first kill at his family's annual deer hunt. But all is not as it should be. His father discovers a poacher on the land, a 640-acre ranch in Northern California, and shows him to the boy through the scope of his rifle. With this simple gesture, tragedy erupts, shattering lives irrevocably.
As someone half-Japanese who grew up in Austria, I've spent the last few years making sense of my relationship to my mother’s homeland. My mother spoke Japanese to us children from an early age, and we spent many childhood summers with our grandparents in Okayama. Because of this, my mother's home feels intimate and familiar to me. But it is also distant and foreign, and it is precisely this unknown, the seemingly exotic and mysterious, that I hope to approach through reading. For me, Japan is a kind of poetic space I set my characters in. In my last three books Japan was both the setting and the secret protagonist.
This book, which appeared in English translation in 2010, is the tender love story of Tokiko, a married woman, and her lover Itakura.
The story is told from the perspective of Taki, the devoted attendant who cares for the house and the family who lives there. In this respect, the reader is dealing with the gaze of a marginal figure, and it is this which makes the book so great: Taki’s gaze is intimate, taking into account everything that happens within the home’s four walls, but is at the same time the cool gaze of an observer on the periphery of all the action.
The book plays out in the pre-war years, but it also depicts the war and the years following. Over the course of this long period, the reader learns that this isn’t just about the love that exists between Tokiko and Itakura. It is also about Taki’s…
The Little House is set in the early years of the Showa era (1926-89), when Japan's situation is becoming increasingly tense but has not yet fully immersed in a wartime footing. On the outskirts of Tokyo, near a station on a private train line, stands a modest European style house with a red, triangular shaped roof. There a woman named Taki has worked as a maidservant in the house and lived with its owners, the Hirai family. Now, near the end of her life, Taki is writing down in a notebook her nostalgic memories of the time spent living in…
As someone half-Japanese who grew up in Austria, I've spent the last few years making sense of my relationship to my mother’s homeland. My mother spoke Japanese to us children from an early age, and we spent many childhood summers with our grandparents in Okayama. Because of this, my mother's home feels intimate and familiar to me. But it is also distant and foreign, and it is precisely this unknown, the seemingly exotic and mysterious, that I hope to approach through reading. For me, Japan is a kind of poetic space I set my characters in. In my last three books Japan was both the setting and the secret protagonist.
From the start, the reader can’t help but notice a tower looming in the distance.
The image has something threatening about it, and also deeply significant; the tower will continue to surface over the course of the novel’s unfolding, when certain fateful moments in the plot become clear, as well as the inescapable and hopeless nature of the main character entangled in it.
For me this book is so much more than “just” a crime novel, like it says on the cover. It is an existential masterwork. Slim, though so much is contained within its pages! The reader stays close at the pickpocket’s heels, following him breathlessly through a maze of streets, at the end of which stands the tower, appearing and disappearing in the distance. Nakamura has been compared to Dostoyevsky.
In my opinion, he doesn’t need that ascription. He is Nakamura – through and through. And for anyone…
Nishimura is a seasoned pickpocket, weaving through Tokyo's crowded streets, in search of potential targets. He has no family, no friends, no connections ...But he does have a past, which finally catches up with him when his old partner-in-crime reappears and offers him a job he can't refuse. Suddenly, Nishimura finds himself caught in a web so tangled and intricate that even he might not be able to escape. Taut, atmospheric and cool, The Thief will steal your breath away.
As someone half-Japanese who grew up in Austria, I've spent the last few years making sense of my relationship to my mother’s homeland. My mother spoke Japanese to us children from an early age, and we spent many childhood summers with our grandparents in Okayama. Because of this, my mother's home feels intimate and familiar to me. But it is also distant and foreign, and it is precisely this unknown, the seemingly exotic and mysterious, that I hope to approach through reading. For me, Japan is a kind of poetic space I set my characters in. In my last three books Japan was both the setting and the secret protagonist.
Now, I am no friend to graphic novels. As a novelist I prefer a story told in long strokes. For Taniguchi Jiro, however, I make an exception.
When I stumbled across A Journal of My Father, I was initially skeptical. Page after page, however, with an almost cinematic panorama laid out before me, I found myself in complete awe of the fine power of observation that Taniguchi brings to the small things in life. The simple and still finds artistic expression in his work, the every day suddenly seems notable, and anyone who – like me – often finds themselves reaching for a handkerchief, consider yourself warned: this touches you, though without a show of sentimentality.
After the death of his father, a man travels to his hometown and, through various conversations and encounters, pursues memories that have stayed with him since childhood. That doesn’t sound all that exciting. But…
KNOW THY FATHER The book opens with some childhood thoughts of Yoichi Yamashita spurred by a phone call at work informing him of his father’s death. So, he journeys back to his hometown after an absence of well over a decade during which time he has not seen his father. But as the relatives gather for the funeral and the stories start to flow, Yoichi’s childhood starts to resurface. The Spring afternoons playing on the floor of his father’s barber shop, the fire that ravaged the city and his family home, his parents’ divorce and a new ‘mother’. Through confidences…
I’ve been writing poetry for most of my life and only recently began a real crash course in fiction with my first novel. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but not for the reasons I thought. In poetry, you learn to locate meaning, but you don’t learn narrative structure. Who knew being an existential genius was easier than finishing a sentence? Once I started studying literature that I felt embodied both, I was able to visualize how my poetic voice wasn’t just applicable, but useful, in the world of fiction.
Novellas are a perfect place to start for poets who are interested in writing longer, more narrative work. They’re slim, lyrical, and less daunting. I read this novella in college & haven’t stopped thinking about it since. It takes place in what I can only refer to as a “Sleeping Brothel” where elderly men pay to sleep beside young women. The story is haunting, but it doesn’t take cheap horror shots. Instead, it delves into the complexity of loneliness, the shared vulnerability of sleep, and the human need for comfort.
Three surreal, erotically charged stories from Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata.
In the three long tales in this collection, Yasunari Kawabata examines the boundaries between fantasy and reality in the minds of three lonely men. Piercing examinations of sexuality and human psychology—and works of remarkable subtlety and beauty—these stories showcase one of the twentieth century’s great writers—in any language—at his very best.
I’ve always seen myself as the kind of person that could tolerate any painful reality. My life has led me in directions that required me to delve deep into the difficult aspects to find some light at the end of the tunnel. Growing up in Texas, I’ve found that being tough is a prescription given to every child. The elements and culture were always difficult, and the realities of loss, drug addiction, and an exhaustive worker culture were a constant that required reinforcement or abandonment. The books I’ve read and written are a product of that environment and its necessities.
No Longer Human spans an entire human life in all its nuances and difficulties.
In some of the more difficult periods of my life, I’ve remembered my experience of No Longer Human and its intricacies in depicting the swarm of political ideology and manipulation of difficult relationships.
It’s a work that beckons you to live your life to your ends and fear only your loss of control over your narrative.
Portraying himself as a failure, the protagonist of Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human narrates a seemingly normal life even while he feels himself incapable of understanding human beings. Oba Yozo's attempts to reconcile himself to the world around him begin in early childhood, continue through high school, where he becomes a "clown" to mask his alienation, and eventually lead to a failed suicide attempt as an adult. Without sentimentality, he records the casual cruelties of life and its fleeting moments of human connection and tenderness.
I became interested in East Asia through studying Kung Fu when I was in high school. Through this I began reading translation of Chinese and Japanese philosophical texts. I initially majored in philosophy but eventually also became interested in situating ideas in broader historical contexts. For this reason, I shifted to intellectual history. However, my passion for philosophy and arguments for the validity of ideas remains. For this reason, my work combines both intellectual history and the history of philosophy.
I found this book a creative addition to the books that attempt to find the origins of modernity in East Asia before contact with the West. Rather than looking at nationalism, Ikegami examines the individualism embedded in the ethics of the samurai. She then shows how starting with Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s ban on swords in the late sixteenth century and the eventual consolidation of the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1603, such individualism had to be curbed or transformed. From this perspective, early modernity in Japan was associated with the emergence of a centralized state that ruled out certain forms of spontaneous aggression, what Weber called the monopoly of violence.
Modern Japan offers us a view of a highly developed society with its own internal logic. Eiko Ikegami makes this logic accessible to us through a sweeping investigation into the roots of Japanese organizational structures. She accomplishes this by focusing on the diverse roles that the samurai have played in Japanese history. From their rise in ancient Japan, through their dominance as warrior lords in the medieval period, and their subsequent transformation to quasi-bureaucrats at the beginning of the Tokugawa era, the samurai held center stage in Japan until their abolishment after the opening up of Japan in the mid-nineteenth…
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