Readers' rating:
Published Sep 2014
352 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
Neil Double is a "conference surrogate," hired by his clients to attend industry conferences so that they don't have to. It's a life of budget travel, cheap suits, and out-of-town exhibition centers - a kind of paradise for Neil, who has reconstructed his incognito professional life into a toxic and selfish personal philosophy. But his latest job, at a conference of conference organizers, will radically transform him and everything he believes as it unexpectedly draws him into a bizarre and speculative mystery.
In a brand new Way Inn - a global chain of identikit mid-budget motels - in an airport hinterland, he meets a woman he has seen before in strange and unsettling circumstances. She hints at an astonishing truth about this mundane world filled with fake smiles and piped muzak. But before Neil can learn more, she vanishes. Intrigued, he tries to find her - a search that will lead him down the rabbit hole, into an eerily familiar place where he will discover a dark and disturbing secret about the Way Inn. Caught on a metaphysical Mobius strip, Neil discovers that there may be no way out.
"The Way Inn is funny, clever and thrilling, its central conceit disturbing enough to demand that you read it outside, if you can." - The Guardian (UK)
"An ingenious and smartly funny novel." - Daily Mail (UK)
"I devoured this impressive and enthralling novel. If you ever explored hotel corridors or played in hotel lifts as a child, be glad it wasn't in this hotel." - Alison Moore, author of the Man Booker finalist The Lighthouse
This information about The Way Inn was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Will Wiles is an architecture and design journalist. He was deputy editor of Icon, a leading British design magazine, and his writing has appeared in Cabinet, New Statesman, and other publications. . His first novel, Care of Wooden Floors, was a Waterstones pick and won a Betty Trask award. He lives in London.
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