Paris, Kabul, Bucharest

It is a well established genre but I cannot find a name for it – Ritz Lit maybe. Books, fact and fiction, set in hotels. Many have appeared on these pages.

The latest is Hotel Exile: Paris in the Shadow of War by Jane Rogoyska about the Hotel Lutetia in Paris during World War II. 

“The Hotel Lutetia is a Paris institution, the only ‘grand’ hotel on the city’s bohemian Left Bank. Ever since it opened, it has served as a meeting place for artists, musicians and politicians. André Gide took his lunch here, James Joyce lived in one of its rooms, Picasso and Matisse were regular guests. It has a darker history, too. During one short period, it became a focus for some of the most dramatic and terrible events in recent history.

In the 1930s the Hotel Lutetia attracted intellectuals and political activists, forced to flee their homes when Hitler came to power, who met here with the hope of forming an alternative government. But when war came, Paris was occupied, and the hotel became the headquarters of the German military intelligence service – and the centre of their operation to root out enemies of the Reich. In 1945, the Lutetia was requisitioned once more, this time transformed into a reception centre for deportees returning from concentration camps.

Hotel Exile is about what happens on the edges of a war. At its heart are three groups of people connected to a place, to one another, and to the dark ideology which dictates the course of their lives. A masterpiece of empathy and concision, Jane Rogoyska’s extraordinary new book offers us a vision of individual human beings desperately trying to find a path through some of the twentieth century’s most devastating events.” (Penguin)

Another newcomer (2025) is The Finest Hotel in Kabul by Lyse Doucet, a well-known voice on the BBC.

“In 1969, the luxury Hotel Inter-Continental Kabul opened its doors: a glistening white box, high on a hill, that reflected Afghanistan’s hopes of becoming a modern country, connected to the world.

Lyse Doucet first checked into the Inter-Continental on Christmas Eve 1988. In the decades since, she has witnessed a Soviet evacuation, a devastating civil war, the US invasion, and the rise, fall and rise of the Taliban, all from within its increasingly battered walls. The Inter-Con has never closed its doors. Now, she weaves together the experiences of the Afghans who have kept the hotel running to craft a richly immersive history of their country. It is the story of Hazrat, the septuagenarian housekeeper, of Abida, who became the first female chef after the fall of the Taliban in 2001. And of Malalai and Sadeq, the twenty-somethings who seized every opportunity offered by two decades of fragile democracy – only to see the Taliban come roaring back in 2021. Through these intimate portraits of Afghan life, the story of a hotel becomes the story of a people.” (Penguin)

But I am about to read an older book in the genre: Athene Palace by RG Waldeck, published in 1942; Rosie Goldschmidt Waldeck. Count von Waldeck was her third husband; Armin Wolrad Widekind Bela Erich Maria Gottschalk Graf von Waldeck, no less. Her marriage was shorter than his name. For six months at the end of 1940 she lived in the Athénée Palace (she simplified the hotel’s name for her memoir) working as a war correspondent for American and Canadian papers, mainly Newsweek. Olivia Manning and her husband were in Bucharest at the same time and the hotel crops up in Fortunes of War, the first book in her Balkan trilogy.

“As European capitals fell during 1940 and 1941, there swarmed to the Athene Palace, Bucharest’s Grand Hotel, diplomats, generals, Gestapo spies, and demi-mondaines from all over Europe. Arriving at the crowded Athene Palace on the day Paris fell in June, 1940, Waldeck observed for the next seven months the events and international figures that made Romania Europe’s last sensational hotbed of intrigue and colour. Hitler’s beautiful feminine agents held court in the Athene Palace lobby within eyeshot of British diplomats, while around them moved fifth columnists, German economists and generals, American and English diplomats and newspapermen, all who made the Athene Palace the most glamorous spot on the continent. The dramatic events of this turbulent period are described here chiefly in terms of personalities: Carol and Lupescu, Antonescu and Dr. Clodius, Nazi Gauleiters, British Quislings, Romanian appeasers, and all the types who dominated the scene of World War II Europe… On the surface this is a fast-moving, dramatic book, as readable as a novel, but it is also a most effective dissection of the Nazi New Order. This penetrating insight into the German administration of Europe reveals the reasons underlying the failure of the Nazi regime.” (Amazon)