4 ideas
Sara Wilby, a nineteen-year-old chambermaid at the Global Hotel, climbed into the hotel's dumb waiter on a dare. The cable failed and she fell to her death. Her ghost opens the novel, trying to find out the exact details of her fall — how long it took, what it felt like — while her memory of words and her senses decay. It is a case of a death that cannot be explained or grieved in proportion to how trivial its cause was.
The ghost's narration loses nouns and scrambles words as she drifts away from the living ('the thing you sit on', words that are almost right). Presence in the world is shown as a matter of holding on to language: losing the ability to name things is how the dead finish dying. It is also how grief, illness and poverty push the living toward silence.
The novel tells one death through five voices: the ghost, the homeless woman Else, the ill receptionist Lise, the journalist Penny and the sister Clare. Each is barely connected to the others, and each holds only a fragment. Meaning comes from the reader putting the fragments together, not from any single authority. The book shows that no one person can see the whole of an event, even a small one.
The Global Hotel sells comfort and anonymity to paying guests. Whether you count as a person depends on your economic role in the building, and the novel exposes this by giving its first-person voices to the people the hotel overlooks.