The Hotel. - Hardcover

Bowen, Elizabeth

3.45

355 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0837146852 ISBN 13: 9780837146850

Publisher: Lincoln MacVeigh - The Dial Press, 1928

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Bowen's first novel, The Hotel, is a wonderful introduction to her disarming, perceptive style. Following a group of British tourists vacationing on the Italian Riviera during the 1920s, The Hotel explores the social and emotional relationships that develop among the well-heeled residents of the eponymous establishment. When the young Miss Sydney falls under the sway of an older woman, Mrs. Kerr, a sapphic affair simmers right below the surface of Bowen's writing, creating a rich story that often relies as much on what is left unsaid as what is written on the page. Bowen depicts an intense interpersonal drama with wit and suspense, while playing with and pushing the English language to its boundaries.

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About the Author:

Elizabeth Bowen was born in Dublin in 1899, the only child of an Irish lawyer and land-owner. She travelled a great deal, dividing most of her time between London and Bowen's Court, the family house in County Cork which she inherited. Her first book, a collection of shorts stories, Encounters, was published in 1923. The Hotel (1926) was her first novel. She was awarded the CBE in 1948, and received honorary degrees from Trinity College, Dublin in 1949, and from Oxford University in 1956. The Royal Society of Literature made her a Companion of Literature in 1965. Elizabeth Bowen died in 1973.

Review:

"The worlds Bowen creates are so immediately absorbing, the glimpses she allows us of the eccentricities of other people's relationships so fascinating, that one cannot help wanting more" -- Selina Hastings "Those qualities which Elizabeth Bowen's prose exemplifies: a formidable precision of writing, a faithful delineation of mood and place - an aspiration towards the absolute truthfulness of the individual vision-If there is anything to the catchphrase "life felt", it is here - in Elizabeth Bowen's munificence of detail, the fine closeness of the atmosphere which she creates" -- Peter Ackroyd

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