Exiled from life elsewhere, a former writer is the narrator of Paul Theroux's first novel since KOWLOON TONG. Newly married and having recently taken over the management of a hotel in Honolulu, he 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.
- ISBN10 0618095012
- ISBN13 9780618095018
- Publish Date 9 May 2001 (first published 26 April 2001)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 1 July 2021
- Publish Country US
- Publisher Houghton Mifflin
- Imprint Houghton Mifflin (Trade)
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 432
- Language English