Книга: Hotel 21 (Rich Senta); Bloomsbury, 2023

'I have a first-day rule. Any sign of trouble, even a whiff of a problem, and I walk.'

Noelle is an efficient and friendly hotel cleaner, a model employee. Or so she'd have you think. The trouble is that she can't help taking little 'souvenirs' as she cleans. Nothing of value, just tokens of happy, normal lives: a lipstick, a hair clip, some tweezers. And by the time the guest has noticed, she's long gone.

As she starts at her 21st hotel, she's determined to beat her record of one month in a five star hotel before suspicion falls on her. But when she meets her new colleagues, her plans are complicated. These women aren't just hands pushing carts down lonely hotel corridors: they are women with lives full of happiness and worry, pain and joy. The kind of lives Noelle has never known how to live. They make her wonder what it might be like to have real friends, people to stick around for…

Will the women at Hotel 21 give her the courage to claim the life she deserves, or will her old habits come back to haunt her?