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. ...

Into the rarefied atmosphere of the Hotel du Lac timidly walks Edith Hope, romantic novelist & holder of modest dreams. Edith has been exiled from home after embarrassing herself & her friends. She has refused to sacrifice her ideals & remains stubbornly single. But among the pampered women & minor nobility Edith finds Mr Neville, & her chance to escape from a life of humiliating spinsterhood is renewed... This book is the winner of the Booker Prize in 1984. ...

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.




...

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.



...

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. ...

Hotel K by Kathryn Bonella, tells the gripping inside story of Bali’s most notorious jail & its inmates. The darkness within its walls conceals tales of violence like the killings passed as suicides; of corruption of the guards organizers of ‘sex nights’; of the bizarre jail’s ecstasy factory. This is the squalid reality shared by people from across the globe & from different backgrounds whose lives tragically converge here. Hotel K is a shocking story & its murky unravelling stands in striking contrast with the long, sunny beaches & shimmering ocean Bali is associated with; a real drama that will have your heart pounding from start to end. ...

Few foreigners have been lucky enough to set foot on Tibetan soil
- Alec Le Sueur spent five extraordinary years there, working
...

After the end of the First World War, Gabriel Dan is released from a POW camp in Russia & begins making his way home to Austria. He comes to an industrial town in Pol&, & checks in the ramshackle Hotel Savoy while awaiting financial aid from his family. Here he meets a kaleidoscope of characters, a microcosm of society in which rich & poor, itinerants, dissidents & malcontents live lives of hope, expectancy & despair in an atmosphere pregnant with revolutionary fervour. ...