Faber lands McBride's 'fierce' novel

Faber will publish the next novel, Strange Hotel, by Eimear McBride about a nameless woman who "negotiates her own memories and impulses" across a series of hotel rooms around the world.

Publisher Alex Bowler acquired UK and Commonwealth Rights (excluding Canada) from Tracy Bohan at the Wylie Agency. Publication is scheduled for February 2020. Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish the novel in the US and McClelland & Stewart in Canada.

“A nameless woman enters a nondescript hotel room that she's been in once before, many years ago,” the synopsis reads. “The room hasn’t changed, but she has. As she occupies a series of hotel rooms around the world – each of which reflects back some aspect of herself – we discover what has or might transpire in these rooms, the rules of engagement between her and the men she sometimes meets, and the outlines of the absence she is trying to forget.”

Faber said: “Fierce, honest, laced with desire and punctuated with black humour, Strange Hotel fully immerses us in a revelatory exploration of a woman’s mind as she attempts to negotiate her own memories and impulses, and edges towards what it might mean to return home.”

Bowler said of the deal: “With Strange Hotel, Eimear again pushes at fiction's possibilities, to create a novel of intensity, urgency and uncommon intimacy. A masterful work of enduring emotional force from one of the great and most daring contemporary writers, this will be a major event in next year's fiction calendar.”

McBride is the author of two novels: her debut A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (Galley Beggar’s Press) won the Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction, Irish Novel of the Year and the Goldsmiths Prize amongst others following publication in 2013. Her second novel, The Lesser Bohemians (Faber), took the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. She was the inaugural creative fellow at the Beckett Research Centre, University of Reading, and occasionally writes for the Guardian, TLS, New Statesman and the Irish Times.