<DIV>A tale of twisted love, from the author of <I>The Diving Pool</I> and <I>The Housekeeper and the Professor</I></DIV><DIV>&nbsp;</DIV><DIV>In a crumbling seaside hotel on the coast of Japan, quiet seventeen-year-old Mari works the front desk as her mother tends to the off-season customers.&nbsp; When one night they are forced to expel a middle-aged man and a prostitute from their room, Mari finds herself drawn to the man's voice, in what will become the first gesture of a single long seduction.&nbsp; In spite of her provincial surroundings, and her cool but controlling mother, Mari is a sophisticated observer of human desire, and she sees in this man something she has long been looking for.</DIV><DIV>&nbsp;</DIV><DIV>The man is a proud if threadbare translator living on an island off the coast.&nbsp; A widower, there are whispers around town that he may have murdered his wife.&nbsp; Mari begins to visit him on his island, and he soon initiates her into a dark realm of both pain and pleasure, a place in which she finds herself more at ease even than the translator.&nbsp; As Mari's mother begins to close in on the affair, Mari's sense of what is suitable and what is desirable are recklessly engaged.</DIV><DIV>&nbsp;</DIV><DIV><I>Hotel Iris</I> is a stirring novel about the sometimes violent ways in which we express intimacy and about the untranslatable essence of love.</DIV>