Edwards-Jones, Imogen

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Edwards-Jones, Imogen

PERSONAL: Born in Birmingham, England.

ADDRESSES: Home—London, England. Agent—William Morris Agency, 52/53 Poland St., London W1F 7LX, England.

CAREER: Novelist, journalist, and broadcaster.

WRITINGS:

The Taming of Eagles: Exploring the New Russia, photographs by Joth Shakerley, Weidenfeld & Nicholson (London, England), 1993.

My Canape Hell (novel), Hodder & Stoughton (London, England), 2000.

Shagpile (novel), Flame (London, England), 2002.

(Editor, with Jessica Adams and Maggie Alderson) Big Night Out, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2002.

The Wendy House (novel), Hodder & Stoughton (London, England), 2003.

(Co-author) Hotel Babylon: Inside the Extravagance and Mayhem of a Luxury Five-Star Hotel (nonfiction), Blue Hen (New York, NY), 2004.

Tuscany for Beginners (novel), Ballantine Books (New York, NY), 2005.

(With anonymous) Air Babylon, Bantam Books (New York, NY), 2005.

ADAPTATIONS: Hotel Babylon is being adapted into an eight-part, prime-time drama for BBC1.

SIDELIGHTS: Imogen Edwards-Jones is a journalist and novelist whose investigations into the inner workings of the hotel and airline industries have revealed often dismaying truths that escape these industries' customers. "Frequent travelers will be fascinated (and maybe a little disturbed)" by Hotel Babylon: Inside the Extravagance and Mayhem of a Luxury Five-Star Hotel, observed reviewer Kate Bonamici in Fortune. Written with an unnamed coauthor who works as a manager at a luxury hotel in London, the book chronicles, on an hour-by-hour basis, the chaotic, demanding, and sometimes bizarre events in a five-star hotel. Ranging from encounters with celebrities in various chemically altered states to outraged customers who refuse to pay hundreds of dollars in phone sex bills to scheming employees who plot to wring the most money out of their guests, the book is a "a no-holds-barred exposé that makes for welcome reading when you're waiting for the next flight or suffering jet lag," stated Margie T. Logarta in Business Traveller Asia Pacific. "This book's stories of propositions, sexual exploits and personal hygiene are far more appalling than amusing," remarked a reviewer in the Economist. A Publishers Weekly contributor called it "an irreverent exposé of the often unimaginable debauchery and dishonesty of the luxury hotel industry."

Air Babylon takes a similar tell-all approach toward the airline industry. Again with the help of an anonymous coauthor with deep insider connections, Edwards-Jones examines an industry rife with "life and death decisions, sex, drugs, money, travel and plenty of people on the make and the take," as she commented in an interview on the Books at Transworld Web site. As a result of her experiences writing Air Babylon, Edwards-Jones has become much less optimistic about air travel. "I now realise that there is nothing anyone can do about anything," she said in her interview. "You take your life in your hands every time you fly and it's down to chance if you make [it] to the end of your journey."

Belinda Smith, the protagonist of Edwards-Jones's debut novel, Tuscany for Beginners, is a snobbish and thoroughly unpleasant owner of a bed and breakfast in Val di Santa Caterina, Italy. Though she is misanthropic and even deceptive to her guests, the locals look on her as a type of contessa, a lordly figure in the valley whose manners and ways are consummately Italian. When her twenty-year-old daughter, Mary, loses her job in London, Mary comes back to help with the bed and breakfast. Belinda, though, would much rather spend time swilling wine with her expatriate friends. Belinda is outraged when an American buys the neighboring Casa Padronale villa with the intent of turning it into a competing hotel. She schemes and tries every dirty trick she knows to prevent the new bed and breakfast from opening, but her opponent is formidable: Lauren is a former Wall Street executive whose main activity was acquiring companies in hostile takeovers. While she thwarts Belinda at every opportunity, her Yale-educated son strikes up a romance with Mary, which no one but the lovers finds acceptable. "Edwards-Jones has fashioned a near-bloody satirical stab at the sentimental Under the Tuscan Sun set, both American and English—with a result quite winning," remarked a Kirkus Reviews critic. Edwards-Jones "makes a boisterous American debut with this bawdy, bewitching comedy of ill-manners," commented Carol Haggas in Booklist.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Best Life, January-February, 2005, "Intrepid Traveler," p. 22.

Booklist, March 1, 2005, Carol Haggas, review of Tuscany for Beginners, p. 1140.

Business Traveller Asia Pacific, July-August, 2005, Margie T. Logarta, review of Hotel Babylon: Inside the Extravagance and Mayhem of a Luxury Five-Star Hotel, p. 18.

Economist, August 14, 2004, "Ever-Revolving Doors: Luxury Hotels," review of Hotel Babylon, p. 74.

Fortune, August 8, 2005, Kate Bonamici, review of Hotel Babylon, p. 111.

Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 2005, review of Tuscany for Beginners, p. 246.

Publishers Weekly, November 8, 2004, review of Hotel Babylon, p. 44.