Since its opening in 1910, the Hotel Lutetia has been a grand Paris institution, a meeting place for artists, intellectuals, musicians, and politicians. In Hotel Exile, Jane Rogoyska writes about what happens at the edges of a war, passing through the doors of a normally functioning hotel, a site under occupation, and, finally, a shelter and place of healing.
In this outstanding book, which has been shortlisted for the Women’s prize for nonfiction, Jane Rogoyska reports that by the mid-1930s the Lutetia had become headquarters to German political dissidents fleeing Hitler ... In the third and final part, Rogoyska’s book soars to great heights.
Jane Rogoyska’s eloquent history brings this period vividly to life, in part through the simple trick of narrating the story in the present tense ... Rogoyska includes some excellent pen portraits of characters on both sides of the war ... The real impact of this book arrives, inevitably, in its final section.
In this exceptional work of non-fiction — you couldn’t call it just a history book, it’s more than that — the British writer Jane Rogoyska tells the wider story of the hotel, and Paris, and France at war ... She captures the historical moment with a rare combination of urgency and empathy ... This is a scintillatingly good book. I think it will win prizes — not least because it is subtly experimental. It is a group biography. That can make a book labyrinthine, but here it feels right to be a little lost in the maze.
