The Swank Hotel: A Novel

Summary

At the outset of the 2008 financial crisis, Em has a dull marketing job generating reports of vague utility while she anxiously awaits news of her sister, Ad, who has gone missing—again. Confronted by unfathomable loss and recovery, Em begins to see how madness permeates everything around her.

Em’s story is layered with other perspectives and voices. There is Frank, the failing manager at her office; Jack, the man Frank has loved for decades; Em and Ad’s eccentric parents who live in a house that is perpetually being built; and Tasio, the young man from Chiapas who works on the house. Through them Lucy Corin portrays porousness and breakdown in individuals and families, in economies and political systems, in architecture, technology, and in language itself.

The Swank Hotel is an acrobatic, surreal, and unexpectedly comic novel. With her idiosyncratic magic, Corin transforms the most mundane spaces into shimmering sites of the uncanny.