Reader Score
74%
74% of readers
recommend this book
"Brookner's most absorbing novel ... wryly realistic ... graceful and attractive." --Anne Tyler, The New York Times Book Review
But instead of peace and rest, Edith finds herself sequestered at the hotel with an assortment of love's casualties and exiles. She also attracts the attention of a worldly man determined to release her unused capacity for mischief and pleasure. Beautifully observed, witheringly funny, Hotel du Lac is Brookner at her most stylish and potently subversive.
In the novel that won her the Booker Prize and established her international reputation, Anita Brookner finds a new vocabulary for framing the eternal question "Why love?"
On why she'll always return to Brookner’s "Hotel du Lac": [it's] the perfect novel about romantic love and how the idea of it can shape or deform your whole identity.
Lou Morgan is a novelist and YA author.
I'm reading HOTEL DU LAC, and it is wonderful. Wonderful. If you're in need of joy, wit & beauty, pick up this book.
"The novel, Brookner’s fourth, drew uncharitable responses after it won the Booker Prize in 1984. But there’s fascinating, bracing tension amid the book’s women, each deemed unfit to be anywhere else..."
"Impeccably written and suffused with pleasing wit." --Newsweek
"Distinctive, spellbinding ... elegant but passionate, funny but oddly earnest.... Novels like hers are why we read novels." --Christian Science Monitor
"A remarkable novel ... Anita Brookner's best." --The Sunday Times (London)