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Hotel

Before Doctor Sleep, there was The Shining, a classic of modern American horror from the undisputed master, Stephen King.

Jack Torrance’s new job at the Overlook Hotel is the perfect chance for a fresh start. As the off-season caretaker at the atmospheric old hotel, he’ll have plenty of time to spend reconnecting with his family and working on his writing. But as the harsh winter weather sets in, the idyllic location feels ever more remote . . . and more sinister. And the only one to notice the strange and terrible forces gathering around the Overlook is Danny Torrance, a uniquely gifted five-year-old.

The Grand Babylon Hotel

Arnold Bennett

Nella, daughter of millionaire Theodore Racksole, orders a dinner of steak and beer at the exclusive Grand Babylon Hotel in London. Her order is refused, so Theodore promptly buys the chef, the kitchen and the whole hotel. But when hotel staff begin to vanish and a German prince goes missing, Nella discovers that murder, blackmail and kidnapping are also on the menu. A rollicking murder mystery from one of the finest writers of the last century.

Hotel Du Lac

Anita Brookner

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 psudonym. 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 resore 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.

Hotel Vendome: A Novel

Danielle Steel

America’s #1 bestseller!

There are some places you visit, and some places you never leave behind. Danielle Steel’s new novel follows a devoted father and the daughter he raises in the fascinating upstairs-downstairs world of a glamorous Manhattan hotel.

HOTEL VENDÔME

The hotel was old, run-down. But to Swiss-born hotelier Hugues Martin, it is a rough diamond tucked away on a quiet New York City street. So Hugues scrapes together everything he has to purchase the building—and transforms it into one of the world’s finest luxury hotels.

Under Hugues’s exacting supervision, the Hotel Vendôme is soon renowned for its unparalleled service and discretion—the ideal refuge for the rich and famous—and a perfect home for Hugues’s family, until his young wife abandons him, leaving Hugues the single parent to their four-year-old daughter. Still, Heloise grows up happily amid a colorful milieu of celebrities, socialites, politicians, world travelers, and the countless hotel employees who all adore her.

As the years pass and unexpected challenges arise, Hugues and the hotel are the center of Heloise’s life. She longs to follow in her father’s footsteps and one day run the Hotel Vendôme. The lessons she learns at his side will carry her through it all, illuminating a story no reader will forget.

Welcome to the Hotel Vendôme.

BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from Danielle Steel's Sins of the Mother.

Hotel World

Ali Smith

Woooooooo-hooooooo.

Five people: four are living; three are strangers; two are sisters; one, a teenage hotel chambermaid, has fallen to her death in a dumbwaiter. But her spirit lingers in the world, straining to recall things she never knew. And one night all five women find themselves in the smooth plush environs of the Global Hotel, where the intersection of their very different fates make for this playful, defiant, and richly inventive novel.

Forget room service: this is a riotous elegy, a deadpan celebration of colliding worlds, and a spirited defense of love. Blending incisive wit with surprising compassion, Hotel World is a wonderfully invigorating, life-affirming book.

In the Kitchen: A Novel

Monica Ali

Monica Ali, nominated for the Man Booker Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, has written a follow-up to Brick Lane that will further establish her as one of England's most compelling and original voices.

Gabriel L ightfoot is an enterprising man from a northern E ngland mill town, making good in London. As executive chef at the once-splendid Imperial H otel, he is trying to run a tight kitchen. But his integrity, to say nothing of his sanity, is under constant challenge from the competing demands of an exuberant multinational staff, a gimlet-eyed hotel management, and business partners with whom he is secretly planning a move to a restaurant of his own. D espite the pressures, all his hard work looks set to pay off.

Until a worker is found dead in the kitchen's basement. It is a small death, a lonely death -- but it is enough to disturb the tenuous balance of Gabe's life.

Elsewhere, Gabriel faces other complications. His father is dying of cancer, his girlfriend wants more from their relationship, and the restaurant manager appears to be running an illegal business under Gabe's nose.

Enter L ena, an eerily attractive young woman with mysterious ties to the dead man. U nder her spell, Gabe makes a decision, the consequences of which strip him naked and change the course of the life he knows -- and the future he thought he wanted.

Readers and reviewers have been stunned by the breadth of humanity in Monica Ali's fiction. S he is compared to D ickens and called one of three British novelists who are "the voice of a generation" by Time magazine. In the Kitchen is utterly contemporary yet has all the drama and heartbreak of a great nineteenth-century novel. Ali is sheer pleasure to read, a truly magnificent writer.

The Blue Hotel

Stephen Crane

This carefully crafted ebook: “The Blue Hotel” is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. "The Blue Hotel" is a short story by American author Stephen Crane (1871–1900). The story first appeared in the 1899 collection entitled The Monster and Other Stories. It is a story about a man who gets in trouble after a stay at the Palace Hotel. Stephen Crane (1871-1900) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and poet who is often called the first modern American writer. The Blue Hotel (1899) is considered one of Crane´s finest short stories.

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet: A Novel

Jamie Ford

"Sentimental, heartfelt….the exploration of Henry’s changing relationship with his family and with Keiko will keep most readers turning pages...A timely debut that not only reminds readers of a shameful episode in American history, but cautions us to examine the present and take heed we don’t repeat those injustices."-- Kirkus Reviews

“A tender and satisfying novel set in a time and a place lost forever, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet gives us a glimpse of the damage that is caused by war--not the sweeping damage of the battlefield, but the cold, cruel damage to the hearts and humanity of individual people. Especially relevant in today's world, this is a beautifully written book that will make you think. And, more importantly, it will make you feel."
-- Garth Stein, New York Times bestselling author of The Art of Racing in the Rain

“Jamie Ford's first novel explores the age-old conflicts between father and son, the beauty and sadness of what happened to Japanese Americans in the Seattle area during World War II, and the depths and longing of deep-heart love. An impressive, bitter, and sweet debut.”
-- Lisa See, bestselling author of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

In the opening pages of Jamie Ford’s stunning debut novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, Henry Lee comes upon a crowd gathered outside the Panama Hotel, once the gateway to Seattle’s Japantown. It has been boarded up for decades, but now the new owner has made an incredible discovery: the belongings of Japanese families, left when they were rounded up and sent to internment camps during World War II. As Henry looks on, the owner opens a Japanese parasol.

This simple act takes old Henry Lee back to the 1940s, at the height of the war, when young Henry’s world is a jumble of confusion and excitement, and to his father, who is obsessed with the war in China and having Henry grow up American. While “scholarshipping” at the exclusive Rainier Elementary, where the white kids ignore him, Henry meets Keiko Okabe, a young Japanese American student. Amid the chaos of blackouts, curfews, and FBI raids, Henry and Keiko forge a bond of friendship–and innocent love–that transcends the long-standing prejudices of their Old World ancestors. And after Keiko and her family are swept up in the evacuations to the internment camps, she and Henry are left only with the hope that the war will end, and that their promise to each other will be kept.

Forty years later, Henry Lee is certain that the parasol belonged to Keiko. In the hotel’s dark dusty basement he begins looking for signs of the Okabe family’s belongings and for a long-lost object whose value he cannot begin to measure. Now a widower, Henry is still trying to find his voice–words that might explain the actions of his nationalistic father; words that might bridge the gap between him and his modern, Chinese American son; words that might help him confront the choices he made many years ago.

Set during one of the most conflicted and volatile times in American history, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is an extraordinary story of commitment and enduring hope. In Henry and Keiko, Jamie Ford has created an unforgettable duo whose story teaches us of the power of forgiveness and the human heart.

BONUS: This edition contains a Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet discussion guide and an excerpt from Jamie Ford's Songs of Willow Frost.

The Haunted Hotel

Wilkie Collins

An enjoyable 19th century read following doomed happenings and grisly, secret premonitions.

An eminent doctor is visited by a desperate woman with a question: am I evil, or insane?

When the letters from Italian servant to his wife in London suddenly cease, she is convinced he has been murdered.

In the darkened bedroom of a mouldering palazzo by the Grand Canal, an English lord sickens and suddenly dies.

How are these little mysteries connected? Spend the night in Room 14 of Venice’s finest hotel, and find out the truth – if you dare...

INCLUDES THE GHOST STORY ‘THE DREAM WOMAN’

Hotel Silence

Audur Ava Olafsdottir

Winner of the Icelandic Literary Prize, Hotel Silence is a delightful and heartwarming new novel from Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir, a writer who “upends expectations” (New York Times). Told with grace, insight, and humor, this is the story of one man’s surprising mid-life adventure of self-discovery that leads him to find a new reason for being.

Jónas Ebeneser is a handy DIY kind of man with a compulsion to fix things, but he can’t seem to fix his own life. On the cusp of turning fifty, divorced, adrift, he’s recently discovered he is not the biological father of his daughter, Gudrun Waterlily, and he has sunk into an existential crisis, losing all will to live. As he visits his senile mother in a nursing home, he secretly muses on how, when, and where to put himself out of his misery.

To prevent his only daughter from discovering his body, Jónas decides it’s best to die abroad. Armed with little more than his toolbox and a change of clothes, he flies to an unnamed country where the fumes of war still hover in the air. He books a room at the sparsely occupied Hotel Silence, and there he comes to understands the depths of other people’s scars while beginning to see his wounds in a new light.

A celebration of life’s infinite possibilities, of transformations and second chances, Hotel Silence is a rousing story of a man, a community, and a path toward regeneration from the depths of despair.

The Next Always

Book 1

“America's favorite writer” (The New Yorker) begins a trilogy inspired by the inn she owns and the town she loves.

The historic hotel in BoonsBoro, Maryland, has endured war and peace, changing hands, even rumored hauntings. Now it's getting a major facelift from the Montgomery brothers and their eccentric mother. As the architect of the family, Beckett has little time for a social life. But there’s another project he’s got his eye on: the girl he’s been waiting to kiss since he was sixteen.

After losing her husband and returning to her hometown, Clare Brewster soon settles into her life as the mother of three young sons while running the town’s bookstore. Though busy, Clare is drawn across the street by Beckett’s transformation of the old inn, wanting to take a closer look…at both the building and the man behind it...

Don't miss the other books in the Inn BoonsBoro Trilogy
The Last Boyfriend
The Perfect Hope

Chelsea Horror Hotel: A Novel

Dee Dee Ramone

Dee Dee Ramone doesn't quite know what he's getting himself into when he and his wife Barbara move into the squalid Chelsea Hotel with their dog Banfield. He spends most of his time trying to score drugs and walking Banfield, with whom he can magically communicate. Meanwhile, he can't stand his neighbors and shies away from violence, but wishes everyone were six feet under. He also thinks that the room he's staying in is the very room where his old friend Sid Vicious stabbed Nancy Spungen, and begins having nightmares of Nancy emerging from the bathroom with a knife wound. After one of his nightmares, an evil force enters his hotel room and hurls him against a wall. Dee Dee also gets involved with the transvestite lover of one of his gay fellow addicts. When his wife finds out, the two fight it out and become seriously wounded. During all this, Dee Dee is tormented by the living and dead demons that plague the hotel, along with the ghosts of his old dead punk rock friends Sid Vicious, Johnny Thunders and Stiv Bators. And that's when the Devil himself decides to join the party . . .

A Gentleman in Moscow: A Novel

Amor Towles

From the New York Times bestselling author of Rules of Civility and the forthcoming novel The Lincoln Highway, a story about a man who is ordered to spend the rest of his life inside a luxury hotel—a beautifully transporting novel.

The mega-bestseller with more than 2 million readers, soon to be a major television series

“Perhaps the ultimate quarantine read . . . A Gentleman in Moscow is about the importance of community; the distance of a kind act; and resilience. It's a manual for getting through the days to come.” —O, The Oprah Magazine

In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him entry into a much larger world of emotional discovery.

Brimming with humor, a glittering cast of characters, and one beautifully rendered scene after another, this singular novel casts a spell as it relates the count’s endeavor to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be a man of purpose.

Creepers

David Morrell

CREEPERS, David Morrell's gripping joyride of a thriller, depicts every harrowing second in eight hours of relentless terror. A New York Times bestseller, it received the prestigious Stoker Award from the Horror Writers Association.

On a cold October night, five people gather in a run-down motel on the New Jersey shore and begin preparations to break in to the Paragon Hotel. Built in the glory days of Asbury Park by a reclusive millionaire, the magnificent structure—which foreshadowed the beauties of art-deco architecture—is now boarded up and marked for demolition.

The five people are "creepers," the slang term for urban explorers: city archeologists with a passion for investigating abandoned buildings and their dying secrets. On this evening, they are joined by a reporter who wants to profile them—anonymously, as this is a highly illegal activity—for a New York Times article.

Frank Balenger isn't looking for just a story, however. And after the group enters the rat-infested tunnel leading to the hotel, it becomes clear that he will get much more than he bargained for. Danger, terror, and death await the creepers in a place ravaged by time and redolent of evil.

The darkest secrets live in places you’re not supposed to be.

“Chilling.” —Stephen King, New York Times bestselling author of Doctor Sleep

“Crack this novel, and it’s like an alien abduction of your brain—forget resuming your normal life until it’s finished. This will be a classic.”—Douglas Preston, New York Times bestselling co-author (with Lincoln Child) of White Fire

“With its nonstop cascade of ingeniously contrived dangers and assaults, culminating in an apocalyptic finale, Creepers provides the essence of all thrillers, an intense emotional effect that will leave readers drained.”—Washington Post

A Place Called Rainwater

Dorothy Garlock

Bestselling author Dorothy Garlock delivers a moving, nostalgic tale of Americana set in Oklahoma in the late twenties.
The small town of Rainwater, Oklahoma, has become a notoriousboomtown now that a gusher has flooded its streets with drillers, welders, and roustabouts of every description. Jill, a spunky and hardworking young woman who runs the hotel for her aunt, is unprepared to cope with the attention she receives from the woman-hungry men. Despite her attempts to thwart their advances, she finds herself cornered by a group of men on the street one afternoon when Thad Taylor, a young neighbor, comes to her rescue. Believing Jill to be a "street flapper," Thad makes it his duty to curb her wild ways. Jill wants nothing to do with Thad-until a woman is murdered in town. Now, Jill's finally accepted Thad's protection... but is she willing to accept more?

Hotel Iris: A Novel

Yoko Ogawa

A tale of twisted love from Yoko Ogawa—author of The Diving Pool and The Housekeeper and the Professor.

In a crumbling seaside hotel on the coast of Japan, quiet seventeen-year-old Mari works the front desk as her mother tends to the off-season customers. When one night they are forced to expel a middle-aged man and a prostitute from their room, Mari finds herself drawn to the man's voice, in what will become the first gesture of a single long seduction. In spite of her provincial surroundings, and her cool but controlling mother, Mari is a sophisticated observer of human desire, and she sees in this man something she has long been looking for.

The man is a proud if threadbare translator living on an island off the coast. A widower, there are whispers around town that he may have murdered his wife. Mari begins to visit him on his island, and he soon initiates her into a dark realm of both pain and pleasure, a place in which she finds herself more at ease even than the translator. As Mari's mother begins to close in on the affair, Mari's sense of what is suitable and what is desirable are recklessly engaged.

Hotel Iris is a stirring novel about the sometimes violent ways in which we express intimacy and about the untranslatable essence of love.

Rose Harbor in Bloom: A Novel

Book 2

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Hailed as “the reigning queen of women’s fiction” (The Sacramento Bee), Debbie Macomber is renowned for her novels of love, friendship, and the promise of fresh starts. Now Macomber returns to the charming Rose Harbor Inn, where each guest finds a second chance and every room comes with an inspiring new view.

Since moving to Cedar Cove, Jo Marie Rose has truly started to feel at home, and her neighbors have become her closest friends. Now it’s springtime, and Jo Marie is eager to finish the most recent addition to her inn. In memory of her late husband, Paul, she has designed a beautiful rose garden for the property and enlisted handyman Mark Taylor to help realize it. She and Mark don’t always see eye-to-eye—and at times he seems far removed—yet deep down, Jo Marie finds great comfort in his company. And while she still seeks a sense of closure, she welcomes her latest guests, who are on their own healing journeys.

Annie Newton arrives in town to orchestrate her grandparents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary celebration. While Annie is excited for the festivities, she’s struggling to move on from her broken engagement, and her grandparents themselves seem to be having trouble getting along. Worse, Annie is forced to see Oliver Sutton, with whom she grew up and who has always mercilessly teased her. But the best parties end with a surprise, and Annie is in for the biggest one of all.

High-powered businesswoman Mary Smith, another Rose Harbor Inn guest, has achieved incredible success in her field, yet serious illness has led her to face her sole, lingering regret. Almost nineteen years ago, she ended her relationship with her true love, George Hudson, and now she’s returned to Cedar Cove to make amends.

Compassion and joy await Jo Marie, Annie, and Mary as they make peace with their pasts and look boldly toward their futures. Rose Harbor in Bloom is Debbie Macomber at her heartwarming best.

BONUS: This edition includes excerpts from Debbie Macomber’s Love Letters and Last One Home.

Praise for Rose Harbor in Bloom

“Takes readers on personal journeys of first love, lost love and recaptured love.”—Bookreporter

“A wonderful reading experience . . . as [the characters’] stories unfold, you almost feel they have become friends.”—Wichita Falls Times Record News

“Readers will find the emotionally impactful storylines and sweet, redemptive character arcs for which the author is famous. Classic Macomber, which will please fans and keep them coming back for more.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Macomber’s legions of fans will embrace this cozy, heartwarming read.”—Booklist

“Macomber uses warmth, humor and superb storytelling skills to deliver a tale that charms and entertains.”—BookPage

“[Macomber] draws in threads of her earlier book in this series, The Inn at Rose Harbor, in what is likely to be just as comfortable a place for Macomber fans as for Jo Marie’s guests at the inn.”—The Seattle Times

“Macomber is an institution in women’s fiction. Her principal talent lies in creating characters with a humble, familiar charm. They possess complex personalities, but it is their kinder qualities that are emphasized in the warm world of her novels—a world much like Rose Harbor Inn, in which one wants to curl up and stay.”—Shelf Awareness

Dance Dance Dance

Haruki Murakami

Dance Dance Dance—a follow-up to A Wild Sheep Chase—is a tense, poignant, and often hilarious ride through Murakami’s Japan, a place where everything that is not up for sale is up for grabs.

As Murakami’s nameless protagonist searches for a mysteriously vanished girlfriend, he is plunged into a wind tunnel of sexual violence and metaphysical dread. In this propulsive novel, featuring a shabby but oracular Sheep Man, one of the most idiosyncratically brilliant writers at work today fuses together science fiction, the hardboiled thriller, and white-hot satire.

Hotel Pastis: A Novel of Provence

Peter Mayle

A beguiling novel of romance, adventure, and tongue-in-cheek suspense set in the South of France, from the beloved, best-selling author of A Year in Provence.

Simon Shaw, a rumpled, fortyish English advertising executive, has decided to leave it all behind, and heads of to France to transform an abandoned police station in the Lubéron into a small but world-class hotel. On his side, Simon has a loyal majordomo and a French business partner who is as practical as she is ravishing. But he hasn’t counted on the malignant local journalist—or on the mauvaise types who have chosen the neighboring village as the site of their latest bank robbery. Slyly funny and overflowing with sensuous descriptions of the good life, Hotel Pastis is the literacy equivalent of a four-star restaurant.

Security: A Novel

Gina Wohlsdorf

“Original and imaginative . . . Ripping suspense, sheer terror, and a wrenching love story.” —Sandra Brown, New York Times bestselling author of Friction

The terrible truth about Manderley is that someone is always watching.

Manderley Resort is a gleaming, new twenty-story hotel on the California coast. It’s about to open its doors, and the world--at least those with the means to afford it--will be welcomed into a palace of opulence and unparalleled security. But someone is determined that Manderley will never open. The staff has no idea that their every move is being watched, and over the next twelve hours they will be killed off, one by one.

Writing in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King, and with a deep bow to Daphne du Maurier, author Gina Wohlsdorf pairs narrative ingenuity and razor-wire prose with quick twists, sharp turns, and gasp-inducing terror. Security is grand guignol storytelling at its very best.

A shocking thriller, a brilliant narrative puzzle, and a multifaceted love story unlike any other, Security marks the debut of a fearless and gifted writer.

“Be surprised, be very surprised: Gina Wohlsdorf brings more than just plot twists and a terrifically tender love story to this thriller . . . It’s her playful homage to Hitchcock and du Maurier that had me reading, howling, and just plain loving this novel.” —Sara Gruen, author of At the Water’s Edge

“Grand Hotel meets Psycho in the age of surveillance . . . Security is cinematically vivid, crisply written, and sharp enough to cut . . . Wohlsdorf brilliantly subverts our expectations of the action genre in this smart, shocking, poignant thriller.” —Emily Croy Barker, author of The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Real Magic

“The thrill of this novel goes beyond its wickedly clever, split-screen, high-tech wizardry—a kind of video gamer’s literary retake of Hitchcock’s Rear Window--and emanates from its strange, disembodied narrator . . . The effect is terrifying, sexy, dizzying, and impossible to look away from.” —Tim Johnston, author of Descent

“Shocking and filled with Tarantino-ish dark humor. . . Structurally reminiscent of the amazing Jennifer Egan,Wohlsdorf’s book is certainly a hybrid, like nothing else. Get ready.” —Ann Beattie, author of The State We’re In

“Flawless . . . Security is perfectly tuned for blockbuster status . . . They don’t make a hotel big enough to house all the people who will want to read this, and soon, as in Manderley, all eyes will be on Wohlsdorf.” —Daniel Kraus, Booklist, starred review

The Hotel Riviera: A Novel

Elizabeth Adler

American Lola Laforet was swept away in a whirlwind wedding and found herself the chef/owner of the Hotel Riviera. Her life seemed to be a dream come true. But then her husband disappeared one day with nothing more than a wave goodbye. Six months later, Jack Ferrar, an American ex-pat living on his boat, drops anchor in Lola's harbor and teaches her the true meaning of attraction. When various shady people-all claiming ownership of the Hotel Riviera-and the police appear, Lola and Jack have to track down the mysterious Patrick. And along the way, they fall in love. With great food, wonderful sensuality, and lush scenery, Elizabeth Adler holds you under her spell and transports you to one of the most romantic places on earth.

Bourbon Street Blues

Maureen Child

Java and jazz: the perfect
New Orleans blend

When coffee executive Parker James
storms into the hotel bar after a
frustrating business meeting, he
spots the beautiful woman who
sang at his wedding ten years ago.

Holly Carlyle has never forgotten that booking. Hours before
the vows, she'd walked in on the bride-to-be having sex with
someone other than Parker.
The marriage is long over, and Parker is ready to move on—with Holly. The jazz they both love draws them together, but
Parker's ex-wife threatens Holly with blackmail to keep them
apart. Holly knows she's been silent too long. There's a risk in
telling the truth, but it's one she has to take.

Some Like It Hot

Lori Wilde

The kitchen at the Hotel Marchand is hot and steamy, but it's not the simmering gumbo that's kicking up the heat. Head chef Robert LeSoeur and sous-chef Melanie Marchand have been battling each other since their first day together.

Taking orders and curbing her creative instincts is tough for an ambitious professional like Melanie, and the attraction she feels for her boss makes it even harder. There's only one solution: get rid of the guy. But when she finds a way to do just that, the doubts begin. She'd have the kitchen to herself, but Melanie also knows she'd be giving up the one man she can't afford to lose.

Hotels of North America

Rick Moody

From the acclaimed Rick Moody, a darkly comic portrait of a man who comes to life in the most unexpected of ways: through his online reviews.

Reginald Edward Morse is one of the top reviewers on RateYourLodging.com, where his many reviews reveal more than just details of hotels around the globe -- they tell his life story. The puzzle of Reginald's life comes together through reviews that comment upon his motivational speaking career, the dissolution of his marriage, the separation from his beloved daughter, and his devotion to an amour known only as "K."

But when Reginald disappears, we are left with the fragments of a life -- or at least the life he has carefully constructed -- which writer Rick Moody must make sense of. An inventive blurring of the lines between the real and the fabricated, Hotels of North America demonstrates Moody's masterly ability to push the bounds of the novel.

Damage Control

Kristi Gold

He'd loved her and left her, and now he was back.

When Hollywood director Pete Traynor walked out on the movie Renee Marchand was producing, his departure ended up costing her the job she loved. Now he's checked into her family's New Orleans hotel and Renee is finding it hard to maintain her cool.

His arrival triggers a lot of memories and just as many questions. Why did he disappear with no explanation? And why hasn't Renee been able to forget the night they spent together? It doesn't take long before she has at least one answer. Pete Traynor is still the most appealing man she's ever met. Now she has to decide what to do about it.

The Cat Who Came to Breakfast

Book 16

Jim Qwilleran and his cats scramble for clues when peaceful Breakfast Island is turned upside-down by murder in this mystery in the New York Times bestselling Cat Who series.

Qwilleran and the cats are visiting an island known by many names. Qwill has always called it Breakfast Island, but to the taciturn natives, it’s Providence Island. To the rich summer resident, it’s Grand Island—and to the developers and tourists who are turning this once-peaceful place into a circus, it’s Pear Island. But when some odd “accidents” occur, including a fatal boat explosion, Qwill suspects sabotage and sets out to investigate—because murder by any other name is just as deadly...

Hotel of the Saints

Ursula Hegi

The bestselling author of Stones from the River and The Vision of Emma Blau renews her reputation as an extraordinary writer of short stories in this major collection that balances her reader on the magical border of laughter and sorrow.

In Hotel of the Saints, Hegi enters the perspectives of lovers and loners, eccentrics and artists, children and parents: a musician tries to protect her daughter from loving a blind man; a seminary student yearns for the certainty of faith that belonged to him as a boy; a woman transcends her embarrassment for her first love, who has tripled in size.

Ursula Hegi's bicultural background enriches these eleven luminous stories that are set in Europe, Mexico, and the United States. Her characters take risks in searching out the unique places where faith thrives for each of them -- a rundown hotel, the currents of Cabo San Lucas, the embrace of an ex-convict. And once again, she surrounds them with her elegant language and exquisite images.

Love is Lovelier

Jean Brashear

If it could happen once…

Anne Marchand is a successful,
independent businesswoman who
loved her late husband, Remy, with
all her heart, and no one could ever
take his place. William Armstrong
knows that, but he'll do anything in his
power to make Anne see that it's okay to love again.
William's a patient man. It was discipline and a willingness to
take risks that helped him build his hotel chain. And when he
sees Anne's beloved Hotel Marchand being threatened by a
takeover bid, he can't sit back and do nothing, so he counters
with a secret offer himself. The only mistake he makes is not
telling Anne.

Ringing In Murder

Book 16

Book a room at the Pennyfoot Hotel this holiday season for a charming mystery that “combines the feel of an Agatha Christie whodunit with a taste of Upstairs Downstairs”(Cozy Library).

A merry hustle and bustle heralds the holidays at the Pennyfoot—and this year is doubly busy. Even as Cecily Sinclair Baxter prepares for the holidays, she’s also helping her friend Madeline plan her impending wedding. This year, Cecily has a cracking holiday surprise for her guests—gorgeous Christmas crackers handmade for the Pennyfoot. And once the crackers pop, one lucky guest will discover a beautiful pearl brooch.

But things soon turn less than jolly. A mysterious fire breaks out in an upstairs room, killing the mood—and two guests. And at the bottom of it all: a missing Christmas cracker. Who would deliver such a murderous gift? Cecily’s dead-set on solving this mystery before another deadly present turns up, and Madeline’s nuptials come unwound...

The Unknown Woman

Laurie Paige

They were supposed to be tourists, not detectives.

There's a dead woman in Matt Anderson's hotel room and he has no idea how she got there. When Kerry Johnston appears from next door to help, both she and Matt recognize the woman as a local waitress and practitioner of voodoo. That's all anyone seems to know about her, but it's not enough for Matt and Kerry.

While alive, this woman had sensed a hidden sadness in the two strangers and directed each of them to a special healing ceremony. As Matt and Kerry investigate her death, something strange starts to happen: the sadness lifts, replaced by a growing certainty that the two of them are meant to be together.

Down and Out in Paris and London

George Orwell

This unusual fictional account, in good part autobiographical, narrates without self-pity and often with humor the adventures of a penniless British writer among the down-and-out of two great cities. In the tales of both cities we learn some sobering Orwellian truths about poverty and society.

The Little Hotel

Christina Stead

‘One of Australia’s greatest novelists puts together...a crew as sad, funny and perverse as any ever gathered.’ Time

After the Second World War, bizarre characters from across the ruined continent have gathered at the ‘fourth-rate’ Hotel Swiss-Touring by Lake Geneva. Some are residents, while other guests have come for the season. In the claustrophobic atmosphere of the little hotel, their eccentricities and their desperation—their jealousies and vindictiveness—are all too apparent.

First published in 1973, shortly before Christina Stead’s return to Australia, The Little Hotel is a sharp, witty satire of changing lives in postwar Europe.

Christina Stead was born in 1902 in Sydney. Stead’s first books, The Salzburg Tales and Seven Poor Men of Sydney, were published in 1934 to positive reviews in England and the United States. Her fourth work, The Man Who Loved Children, has been hailed as a ‘masterpiece’ by Jonathan Franzen, among others. In total, Stead wrote almost twenty novels and short-story collections. Stead returned to Australia in 1969 after forty years abroad for a fellowship at the Australian National University. She resettled permanently in Australia in 1974 and was the first recipient of the Patrick White Award that year. Christina Stead died in Sydney in 1983, aged eighty. She is widely considered to be one of the most influential Australian authors of the twentieth century.

‘This neat little volume will appeal to readers who enjoy historical fiction with a good dose of satire. Classic fiction from an award-winning Australian author.’ BookMooch

‘How to describe it? It’s like a meteorite from Krypton landed on Ozlit’s bindi-eye-riddled lawn, greenly glowing. Or perhaps a mosaic of imagined intimacies...Stead is a recording angel of the threadbare European middle class of the postwar years.’ Saturday Paper

‘In this highly confined setting, Stead creates a busy mini-Europe of petty and poignant crises, or perhaps a molehill of The Magic Mountain. This is an excellent place for the Stead novice to begin enjoying her artistry.’ STARRED REVIEW, Kirkus Reviews