The Pink Hotel — Anna Stothard

A seventeen-year-old girl pieces together the mystery of her mother's life and death among the bars and bedrooms of Los Angeles in this dazzling debut novel.

A raucous, drug-fueled party has taken over a boutique hotel on Venice Beach -- it's a memorial for Lily, the now-deceased, free-spirited proprietress of the place. Little do the attendees know that Lily's estranged daughter -- and the nameless narrator of this striking novel -- is among them, and she has just walked off with a suitcase of Lily's belongings.

Abandoned by Lily many years ago, she has come a long way to learn about her mother, and the stolen suitcase -- stuffed with clothes, letters, and photographs -- contains not only a history of her mother's love life, but perhaps also the key to her own identity. As the tough, resourceful narrator tracks down her mother's former husbands, boyfriends, and acquaintances, a risky reenactment of her life begins to unfold. Lily had a knack for falling in love with the wrong people, and one man, a fashion photographer turned paparazzo, has begun to work his sinuous charms on the young woman.

Told with high style and noirish flare, Anna Stothard's The Pink Hotel is a powerfully evocative debut novel about wish fulfillment, reckless impulse, and how we discover ourselves.