Travel: It is an enticing jacket cover (see right) - a grand room, a pool framed by columns, vegetation spilling from the balcony above. It is an enticing mission.
Following a couple of days of indulgence in Parisian hamams, having the dirt scoured from their flesh and the toxins put to flight from their steamed pores, Alexia Brue and a college pal, Marina, decide to open a hamam of their own in their home town of New York. Brue takes off for a fortnight's research in Istanbul, only to return home six months later having sweated, scrubbed and cooled her way through the bathing traditions of several countries.
So, one settles back for all the usual elements of the genre, in which a westerner stumbles through the proud, impenetrable traditions and cultures of other lands. In which the whole adventure is glazed with serendipity and eccentricity. It includes the uncertain romantic liaison with a local. And the existential side-tracking over what modern life is all about.
Mainly, though, it is a book about baths. So many baths. The crumbling traditions of the Turkish hamams, eroded by Ataturk's relentless modernising. The ancient Roman baths (one of which Brue helps to excavate in Greece), once orgiastic but practical places where one could get "lunch, a quickie and a molar extraction" on one visit, and where they say the Roman empire fell under the indolent spell of the heat.
Brue journeys to the banyas of St Petersburg and Moscow, where etiquette is strict and the exposure to extreme heat is deliberately penitential. After that comes Finland, fanatical about its saunas, and finally Japan, where the volcanic archipelago has resulted in a nation of "soakers" in the onsen thermal pools.
Ultimately, Alexia and Marina don't get around to opening their own hamam, and Brue decides instead to "collect baths", or at least her experience of them. Brue now writes for Spa Finder magazine, which sounds like a happy ending to me.
If one is going to set about opening up the hitherto untapped (sorry) world of baths, it helps to have a hefty reserve of flair to go with the passion. Brue does not. The writing veers between guidebook prose and diary musings. There is a personal story here, chiefly to do with her dissipating feelings for her New York boyfriend, Charles. He finally appears in the flesh three-quarters of the way through, before drifting off again without his presence having added anything to our sense of his personality.
Meanwhile, Brue visits bath after bath, noting the cultures, rituals and pubic hairstyles of the women she shares steam with. Yet, it is all flat and wan, as if she is missing something or at least can't quite get the words around her experiences.
The historical passages - the points at which to dazzle a reader who didn't know they could be so fascinated by baths, of all things - are clumsy and vague. Ultimately, she settles for the prosaic. Much space is given to receiving directions from locals: a left up the hill, a right there and . . . no, hold on, a right up the hill . . . And things are held up, while guidebook pragmatism takes over, so that there are plenty of paragraphs like this one:
The listed prices, for a tourist hamam, were reasonable. Roughly $8 for a bath, $15 if you added the kese and massage. Certainly it was excellent value compared to some of the fleecers and baksheeshers employed at Galatasaray and Cagaloglu. But compared to the neighbourhood hamam, where you could have the works for $6, it was steep.
When Brue does reach for the soap, things can get very slippery indeed. Here she describes a visit to an Istanbul hamam:
Anyone sense-experiencing this room for the first time would be dazzled and overwhelmed; all five senses experiencing it in tandem were vying for attention amid sensory chaos.
This reader sense-experiences that all five fingers holding the book are slipping in tandem amid syntactical chaos. I need a bath. Pile those suds high.
Cathedrals of the Flesh: in Search of the Perfect Bath By Alexia Brue
Bloomsbury, 214pp, £16.99
Shane Hegarty is an Irish Times journalist