Ali Smith: Hotel World; David Mitchell: Number9dream

By MARGIE THOMSON

Both these books were published last year and were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Available now in paperback, they share a surreality, although in most other respects they are very different. I loved them both, while loosely categorising Smith's book as a "girl's book" and Mitchell's as a "boy's book".

Smith creates five female characters - including one already dead - with stories that connect through the Global Hotel. The Global sits amid a disturbing social landscape, filled with incoherency and emptiness. Yet the story itself is rich and almost druglike in its readability. One of the characters has died in questionable circumstances while working at the hotel; another is a homeless woman who begs just outside its doors; another is a receptionist who takes pity on her and invites her inside; another is a journalist on the hunt for a good, or for any, story; another is the sister of the dead woman. The final result is a kind of spurious connectedness, washed over with our fundamental aloneness - rather like a corridor of empty hotel rooms.

Mitchell's book is set in mad, teeming Tokyo and is not so much surreal as hyper-real. It has the frenetic pace of a digital game, sometimes providing multiple outcomes. It concerns the lovable 20-year-old Eiji Miyake, recently come to Tokyo on a search for his father.

Extraordinarily violent at times, as Eiji inadvertently gets involved in "a turf war between wolves with rabies", there is nevertheless a lot more to this novel than mere cyber-punk. It's more traditional than you at first suspect. It's a coming-of-age novel that explores fundamental issues about identity, family, nationhood, morality. Fantastic.

HOTEL WORLD

Hamish Hamilton

$34.95

NUMBER9DREAM

Sceptre

$24.95