Clean: A Novel

by Laura Otis

Ginny has already survived more than most people. Abused as a child, she now lives an isolated life as a housekeeper at the Run-Rite Inn in a small Texas town. Her closest bonds are with the rooms she cleans, which she attempts to protect from abusive guests. The inn's devoted manager, Jake, who knows every hinge on every door and the personality of every room, encourages Ginny to think beyond dusting, vacuuming, and scrubbing. But little does she know that he has dreams beyond what the inn provides and will do just about anything to make them come true. When Ginny sees signs that human traffickers are using the inn, she struggles with her intense fear of people. As she begins to suspect that Jake is involved with the illegal operation, she hesitates to intervene, tempted by higher-paying work. But then a shocking discovery brings her face-to-face with her own past, leaving her with no choice but to act-even if it means turning against Jake. Clean is the gripping story of an abused housekeeper who must overcome her inner fears to help women held at a cheap motel by human traffickers.

132 pages, Paperback

Published January 8, 2019

About the author

Trained as a neuroscientist and literary scholar, Laura Otis, Ph.D., studies the ways that literature and science intersect. In her interdisciplinary research, she compares scientific and literary writers' descriptions of memory, identity, emotion, and thought. Her research has been supported by MacArthur, Guggenheim, Fulbright, and Humboldt Fellowships. Otis earned her BS in Biochemistry at Yale University, her MA in Neuroscience from the University of California at San Francisco, her PhD in Comparative Literature from Cornell University, and her MFA in Fiction from Warren Wilson College. Since 2004 she has been a Professor of English at Emory University, where she teaches interdisciplinary courses on literature, neuroscience, cognitive science, and medicine. Otis is the author of Organic Memory (1994), Membranes (1999), Networking (2001), Müller’s Lab (2007), Rethinking Thought (2016), and Banned Emotions (2019). She has also translated neurobiologist Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s Vacation Stories (2001) into English and has edited Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology (2002). A fiction-writer as well as a scholar, she is the author of the novels Clean, Refiner’s Fire, Lacking in Substance, The Tantalus Letters, and The Memory Hive. Her current project, The Neuroscience of Craft, examines what neuroscientists and creative writers can learn from each other about how sensations blend in people’s minds.