Product DescriptionA bold and brilliant debut from a darkly funny new voice.Oskar is a minimalist composer best known for a piece called Variations on Tram Timetables. He is married to a Californian art dealer named Laura and he lives with two cats, named after Russian composers, in an Eastern European city. But this book isn't really about Oskar. Oskar is in Los Angeles, having his marriage dismantled by lawyers. He has entrusted an old university friend with the task of looking after his cats, and taking care of his perfect, beautiful apartment.Despite the fact that Oskar has left dozens of surreally detailed notes covering every aspect of looking after the flat, things do not go well.Care of Wooden Floors is about how a tiny oversight can trip off a disastrous and farcical (fatal, even) chain of consequences. It's about a friendship between two men who don't know each other very well. It's about alienation and being alone in a foreign city. It's about the quest for perfection and the struggle against entropy. And it is, a little, about how to take care of wooden floors.About the AuthorWill Wiles is an architecture and design journalist. He lives in London.

Care of Wooden Floors

Wiles, Will

HarperPress

Literature & Fiction

Humor & Satire

Fourth Estate

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. 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 - he meets a woman he has seen before in strange and unsettling circumstances. 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 disturbing secret about the Way Inn.

Way Inn

Fourth Estate Ltd.

The Way Inn

Plume

Up in the Air meets Inception in this smart, innovative, genre-synthesizing novel from the acclaimed author of Care of Wooden Floors—hailed as “Fawlty Towers crossed with Freud,” by the Daily Telegraph—that takes the polished surfaces of modern life, the branded coffee, and the free wifi, and twists them into a surrealistic nightmare of infinite proportions.
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: A Novel

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

Harper-perennial

A brilliantly dark literary debut of death, destruction and interior decoration. "But for the floors, and the sofa, and the porn, and the dead and missing, the flat was restored to order." An old friend asks you to look after his two cats and his apartment. What could go wrong? Care of Wooden Floors is about how a tiny oversight can trip off a disastrous and farcical (fatal, even) chain of consequences. It's about a friendship between two men who don't know each other very well. It's about alienation and being alone in a foreign city. It's about the quest for perfection and the struggle against entropy. And it is, a little, about how to take care of wooden floors. Oskar is a Mittel-European minimalist composer best known for a piece called "Variations on Tram Timetables." He is married to a Californian art dealer named Laura and he lives with two cats, named after Russian composers, in an Eastern European city. But this book isn't really about Oskar. Oskar is in Los Angeles, having his marriage to Laura dismantled by lawyers. He has entrusted an old university friend with the task of looking after his cats, and taking care of his perfect, beautiful apartment. Despite the fact that Oskar has left dozens of surreally detailed notes covering every aspect of looking after the flat, things do not go well. Dark, funny and compelling, this novel takes your breath away with its extraordinarily distinctive writing. The voice is unexpected, constantly, but consistently conveys a universal human experience that pulls the reader right into the world of the narrator.

Anchor Canada

A witty debut novel about a housesitting gig gone terribly, hilariously wrong. A British copywriter stays for a week at his composer friend Oskar’s elegant, ultramodern apartment in a glum Eastern European city. The instructions are simple: feed the cats, don’t touch the piano, and make sure nothing harms the priceless wooden floors. Content for the first time in ages, he accidentally spills some wine. Over the course of a week, both the apartment and the narrator’s sanity fall apart in this original and “weirdly addictive” (Daily Mail) novel. As the situation in and out of the sleek apartment spirals out of control, more of Oskar’s notes appear, taking on an insistent—even sinister—tone.Care of Wooden Floors is a must-read for anyone who’s ever bungled a housesitting gig, or felt inferior to a perfectionist friend—that is to say, all of us.

Care of Wooden Floors: A Novel

Little A / New Harvest

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Wiles, Will. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Wiles, Will

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Wiles, Will. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Care of Wooden Floors

Care of Wooden Floors

Care of Wooden Floors

Way Inn

The Way Inn

Plume

Plume

The Way Inn: A Novel

Care of Wooden Floors

Care of Wooden Floors: A Novel