The Vacation

"Vacation" (originally published as "Welcome to Wherever You Are" and later republished as "The Vacation") was John Marrs' debut novel. It follows nine travelers of wildly different backgrounds — among them Tommy, Jake, Nicole, Eric, Savannah, Ruth, Jane, Declan, and Matty — who all end up staying at the same rundown backpackers' hostel in Venice Beach, Los Angeles, over one long summer.

Each has come to the hostel to escape something: Nicole is an English nurse retracing Route 66 in memory of a patient she lost; Savannah is a pole dancer hiding from henchmen sent by her evangelical father; Eric is an Englishman trying to reinvent himself; Ruth has crossed the world hoping to meet her favorite actor. Marrs interweaves their separate storylines — grief, greed, obsession, and reinvention — until the hostel becomes a pressure cooker where everyone's secrets are eventually exposed.

Told through multiple points of view, the novel is a character-driven psychological thriller rather than a single-mystery plot, building tension through the collision of very different people forced into close quarters.