Hotel Du Lac

by Anita Brookner

Edith Hope, a writer of romantic novels, has jilted her worthy but dull lover at the registry office. She is now staying at a Swiss hotel where she has been banished by her friends to recover from the disgrace. There, in her prim and proper prison, she grapples with the meaning of love, which she begins to understand better through the lives and loves of the hotel's other guests. In 1984, the novel won the Booker Prize for its delicate but sublime narrative unraveling of the quandary of romance.

Editions of Hotel Du Lac

ISBN 9780679759324	Binding/Format Paperback	Publisher Vintage Books	Date 1995	Price $1.00	Used - Acceptable
ISBN 9780525484974	Binding/Format Paperback	Publisher Penguin USA	Date 1988	Price $1.00	Good
ISBN 9780394542157	Binding/Format Hardcover	Publisher Random House Inc	Date 1985	Price $1.00	Good

Publisher Notes

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?" It tells the story of Edith Hope, who writes romance novels under a pseudonym. When her life begins to resemble the plots of her own novels, however, Edith flees to Switzerland, where the quiet luxury of the Hotel du Lac promises to restore her to her senses.
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.

Media Reviews

"A novel about romance, and reality, and the gap between them... It has a good deal to say about loneliness and vulnerability, about sensitive losers and insensitive winners."