Sam is a war photographer famous for her hauntingly beautiful pictures of the dead. After a particularly gruelling assignment, she checks into an expensive hotel. Unfortunately she has chosen the exact moment terrorists attack the hotel. Abhi, the hotel manager, begs her to stay quiet & stay put. Abhi has never wanted to be a hero; a disappointment to his army father & brother. He thought he`d come to a safe haven at the hotel, a place where he could be himself. Now stuck inside the sealed-off manager`s office in the middle of a terrorist attack, he is desperately trying to keep those still alive safe. His lover Dieter is amongst the hostages in the bar & the photographer Sam, refusing to stay in her room, is roaming through the hotel taking pictures, potentially coming face to face with the terrorists at any moment. A small child, Billy, is found alive under the bodies of his dead parents & Abhi has to persuade the non-maternal Sam to bring him back to her room. He`s hurt & Sam has no clue how to look after a child. As the tension mounts & more people are killed, the bond between Sam & Abhi, between Sam & Billy, grows. If any of them get out alive, none of them will ever be the same... ...

` Something strange occurs to guests as soon as they check in. Even if in real life they are perfectly well-mannered, decent people with proper balanced relationships, as soon as they spin through the revolving hotel doors the normal rules of behaviour no longer seem to apply.` All of the following is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the guilty. All the anecdotes, the stories, the characters, the situations, the highs, the lows, the scams, the drugs, the misery, the love, the death & the insanity are exactly as was told by Anonymous
- someone who has spent his whole career working in hotels at the heart of London`s luxury hotel industry. However, for legal reasons, the stories now take place in a fictitious hotel known as Hotel Babylon. More than a decade is compressed into a day. Everything else is as it should be. The rich spend money, the hotel makes money & the chambermaids still fight the bellboys over a two-pound coin. It`s just another twenty-four hours in an expensive London hotel.
...

Kati Hirschel, in her thirties, is the proud owner of Istanbul`s only crime bookshop. When the German director of a film starring an old school friend is found murdered in his hotel room Kati cannot resist the temptation to start her own maverick investigation. After all her friend Petra is the police`s principal suspect & reading all those detective novels must have taught Kati something. This is a crime story but also a wonderful book about Istanbul & Turkish society. It uses humour, social commentary & even erotic fantasy to expose Western European prejudices about Turkey as well as Turkish stereotyping of other Europeans. ...

Rio de Janeiro. A family hotel whose clients reflect Brazilian society, multi-racial, with starkly contrasting backgrounds, & destitute. Rio is the perfect backdrop with its dictatorships, drug wars, child gangs & violent policing tactics. The first victim is found decapitated in bed, the head lying on the floor of his room. An eerie Mona Lisa smile on the victim`s face & no evidence of a struggle indicate a murderer received as a friend. Other hotel guests are eventually killed, all decapitated. A classical crime novel in one way but really an opportunity for the author to describe Brazilian society, especially those left behind. Fascinating back stories are told such as that of the maid who dreams of making it in television soaps, & the female pimp who has survived incestuous rape, wrapped in a suspenseful intrigue that could have been thought up by Ruth Rendell. ...

The story of a remarkable time & place: Los Angeles from the dawn of the singer-songwriter era in the mid-Sixties to the peak of The Eagles` success in the late Seventies. ` Hotel California` is an epic tale of songs & sunshine, drugs & denim, genius & greed, & is the first in-depth account of the LA Canyons scene between 1967 & 1976. Hoskyn`s history of this vital period in the development of today`s great musical influences spans the rise of Joni Mitchell, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, The Eagles, James Taylor & Jackson Browne, & focuses on the brilliance & determination of David Geffen, the man who linked them all. Covering genius, drug-crazed disintegration, & the myriad relationships between these artists & the songs that issued from them, & drawing on extensive interviews with countless stars, singers, writers, managers, executives & scenesters, ` Hotel California` is a pop-culture classic. ...

Amid the rubble of a city blasted by a civil war that many fear will cross borders & engulf Europe, the Hotel Florida on Madrid's chic Gran Via has become a haven for foreign journalists & writers. It is here that six people meet & find their lives changed forever. Ernest Hemingway, his career stalled, his marriage sour, hopes that this war will give him fresh material & a new romance; Martha Gellhorn, an ambitious young journalist hungry for love & experience, thinks she will find both with Hemingway in Spain. Robert Capa & Gerda Taro, idealistic & ground-breaking young photographers based in Paris, want to capture history in the making & are inventing moder photojournalism in the process. & Arturo Barea, chief of the Republican government's foreign press office, & Ilsa Kulcsar, his Austrian deputy, are struggling to balance truth-telling with their loyalty to their sometimes-compromised cause
- a struggle that places both of their lives at risk. Hotel Florida traces the tangled wartime destinies of these three couples
- & a host of supporting characters from Antoine de Saint-Exupery to John Dos Passos
- living as intensely as they had ever done, against the backdrop of a critical moment in history. Amanda Vaill has mined teh raw material of unpublished letters, diaries, & reels of film
- including Martha Gellhorn's personal papers, which shed new light on her & Hemingway's activities during the war, & Capa & Taro's recently rediscovered ' Mexican Suitcase' negatives, which permit an unprecedented frame-by-frame close-up of their experiences. The result is a narrative of love & reinvention that is, finally, a story about truth, finding it, telling it
- & living it, whatever the cost.




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Amid the rubble of a city blasted by a civil war that many fear will cross borders & engulf Europe, the Hotel Florida on Madrid`s chic Gran Via has become a haven for foreign journalists & writers. It is here that six people meet & find their lives changed forever. Ernest Hemingway, his career stalled, his marriage sour, hopes that this war will give him fresh material & a new romance; Martha Gellhorn, an ambitious young journalist hungry for love & experience, thinks she will find both with Hemingway in Spain. Robert Capa & Gerda Taro, idealistic & ground-breaking young photographers based in Paris, want to capture history in the making & are inventing moder photojournalism in the process. & Arturo Barea, chief of the Republican government`s foreign press office, & Ilsa Kulcsar, his Austrian deputy, are struggling to balance truth-telling with their loyalty to their sometimes-compromised cause
- a struggle that places both of their lives at risk. Hotel Florida traces the tangled wartime destinies of these three couples
- & a host of supporting characters
- living as intensely as they had ever done, against the backdrop of a critical moment in history. It is a narrative of love & reinvention that is, finally, a story about truth, finding it, telling it
- & living it, whatever the cost.



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All the establishments featured have been officially inspected & rated for quality by the AA`s professional inspectors, each graded with 1 to 5 Stars, with AA Red Stars highlighting Inspectors` Choice Hotels. There are more establishments offering more choice than competing guides & over 500 budget hotels are featured, ideal for overnight stops. Plus, up-to-date details of room prices, credit cards, parking, directions & leisure facilities throughout. Central reservation telephone numbers are featured for the major hotel groups. ...

Having celebrated 50 years as Britain`s most complete guide to where to stay, the AA Hotel Guide continues to showcase hotels from across the UK & Ireland with over 2, 600 hotels, including over 700 budget hotels. From the most opulent & sophisticated of London`s elite hotels to personally run small hotels in the British countryside & from the practical & convenient budget hotel aimed at business or air travellers, to the luxurious country house hotel catering for leisure & sporting guests, the AA Hotel Guide is your best resource to find places to stay. All year round the AA`s expert inspectors are visiting & grading the hotels that appear in this guide. Each one is judged on presentation, quality of accommodation, leisure & sporting facilities, food operation, service, hospitality, conference facilities & cleanliness. They are then rated for quality with the very best achieving the coveted red stars. ...

In a crumbling, seaside hotel on the coast of Japan, quiet, seventeen-year-old Mari works the front desk as her mother fusses over the off-season customers. When, one night, they are forced to eject a prostitute & a middle-aged man from his room, Mari finds herself drawn to the man's voice, in what will become the first gesture of a long seduction. The mysterious man lives quietly as a translator on an island off the coast. A widower, there are murmurs around town that he may have murdered his wife. Mari begins to visit him, but as he initiates her into a dark realm of both pain & pleasure, she finds herself also attracted to his earnest young nephew. As Mari's mother & the police begin to close in on the illicit affair, events move to a dramatic climax. ...