If there is such a thing as a comfort food book Bemelmans stories are it. His evocative tales of grand hotel life have a reporters eye for sensory detail yet he always manages to bathe his world & its lovable characters in the mood of a fairytale. Meet the girl-hungry hotel Magician Kalakobe the African cook Mr Sigsag Monsieur Victor Mespoulet & an unforgettable cast of down but not yet out hotel employees. A feast of food writing. & once youve read one Bemelmans tale you fall in love & want to read the lot. ...

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. ...

A hotel voucher makes a great gift idea for anyone who likes to get away whether they enjoy spending a night out on the town visiting friends around the country or just getting away from it all occasionally. How about a stay in Edinburgh where you will find a city of contrasts shopping & historic attractions sit side by side & the cobbled streets of the Old Town blend with the many modern restaurants & cafes. Paris is one of the most romantic cities in Europe & you will find the beauty of the city overwhelming making this an unforgettable place to visit. From iconic tourist attractions to beachfront cool Brighton is a treasure trove of things to do & places to go. Vibrant colourful fun & free Brighton offers the energy of the city & freedom of the sea. The voucher can be redeemed towards an overnight stay at a choice of hotels around the country or it can be used to make a stay even more special perhaps upgrading your room on a romantic getaway or choosing to stay in a European location as a special treat. ...

Welcome to Hotel Kerobokan or Hotel K Bali's most notorious jail. Its walls touch paradise; sparkling oceans surf beaches & palm trees on one side while on the other it's a dark bizarre & truly frightening underworld of sex drugs violence & squalor. Hotel K's filthy & disease ridden cells have been home to the infamous & the tragic: a Balinese King Gordon Ramsay's brother Muslim terror bombers beautiful women tourists & surfers from across the globe. Petty thieves share cells with killers rapists & gangsters. Hardened drug traffickers sleep alongside unlucky tourists who've seen their holiday turn from paradise to hell over one ecstasy pill. Hotel K is the shocking inside story of the jail & its inmates revealing the wild 'sex nights' organised by corrupt guards for the prisoners who have cash to pay the jail's ecstasy factory the killings made to look like suicides the days out at the beach the escapes & the corruption that means anything is for sale
- including a fully catered Italian jail wedding or a luxury cell upgrade with a Bose sound system. The truth about the dark heart of Bali explodes off the page.
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' The first of my father's illusions was that bears could survive the life lived by human beings & the second was that human beings could survive a life led in hotels'. So says John Berry son of a hapless dreamer brother to a cadre of eccentric siblings & chronicler of the lives lived the loves experienced the deaths met & the myriad strange & wonderful times encountered by the family Berry. Hoteliers pet-bear owners friends of Freud (the animal trainer & vaudevillian that is) & playthings of mad fate they 'dream on' in this funny sad outrageous & moving novel. ...

The very aptly named Mr Pong had the kind of breath that could stun at over ten feet... This wasnt just bad
- there was something
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The Sunday Times Bestseller When Swiss-born Hugues Martin sees a small run-down hotel in New York for the rough diamond it is he transforms it into a beautiful boutique hotel of impeccable elegance run with the precision & attention to detail he learned through his hotelier training in Europe. Renowned for its unparalleled service the Hotel Vendome soon becomes the ideal New York refuge for the rich & famous as well as a perfect home for Hugues' beautiful wife & their young daughter. But when his wife tires of his obsession for the hotel she walks out on him for a notorious rock star leaving Hugues a single parent to four-year-old Heloise. Heloise & her family live happily amid a colourful exciting & sometimes mysterious milieu of celebrities socialites politicians world travellers & hotel employees
- & their inevitable intrigues. As unexpected challenges arise the hotel is the centre of their world. & when Heloise grows us she longs to follow in her father's footsteps & one day run the Hotel Vendome. The lessons she learned at his side will carry her through it all in a story no reader will forget.
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This is a heart-rending page turner which sweeps from war-torn Europe to Thailand & back again.. . As a child Julia Forrester spent many idyllic hours in the hothouse of Wharton Park estate where her grandfather tended the exotic flowers. So when a family tragedy strikes Julia returns to the tranquility of Wharton Park & its hothouse. Recently inherited by charismatic Kit Crawford the estate is undergoing renovation. This leads to the discovery of an old diary prompting the pair to seek out Julia's grandmother to learn the truth behind a love affair that almost destroyed Wharton Park. Julia is taken back to the 1940s where the fortunes of young couple Olivia & Harry Crawford will have terrible consequences on generations to come. For as war breaks out Olivia & Harry are cruelly separated... ...

This is a heart-rending page turner which sweeps from war-torn Europe to Thailand & back again.. . As a child Julia Forrester spent many idyllic hours in the hothouse of Wharton Park estate where her grandfather tended the exotic flowers. So when a family tragedy strikes Julia returns to the tranquility of Wharton Park & its hothouse... See Judys Review See Richards Review See Lucinda Riley talk about her book Reading Group Questions Read our exclusive Q&A with Lucinda Riley Write a Review for Room Judys Review This debut novel is a real saga describing the secret history of an ancient Norfolk stately home & the chequered shady pasts of its most recent inhabitants which has led to the gradual decay of the fortunes of the great Wharton Park estate. Our heroine is Julia Forrester a world-acclaimed concert pianist who has just lost her husband & little boy in an horrific car crash. They had been living in France; now she returns to her childhood roots in Norfolk to grieve alone. But once back in close proximity to Wharton Park where her grandfather worked as head gardener she meets Kit Crawford the young man who has inherited the title & the estate. Now forced to sell the grand house & land because the estate is so heavily in debt he renovates the old cottage once lived in by Julias grandparents as a humble place to stay. But there he finds a secret diary; thinking it was written by Julias grandfather he gives it to her. But what is revealed in the diary is earth-shattering. It takes Julia & the reader back in time to the story of Harry & Olivia Crawford a young couple who once seemed so in love but whose marriage was torn apart by the Second World War. Harry its revealed had a secret life in Thailand; & the exotic blooms the rare & delicate orchids for which the Wharton greenhouse is famed & which Julias grandfather devoted his life to nurturing assume a new darker meaning. Richards Review What really fascinates me about this novel is the account of how a standard upper-class English marriage especially one in which property inheritance & the responsibility of looking after an historic estate on which the livelihoods of hundreds of local people depend could be almost instantly shattered by the terrible reality of war. Young Lord Harry Crawford is married to the beautiful Olivia who is expecting his child. But he fin" ...

On a crisp Autumn evening in western Nebraska what started as a group of kids filming their drug-fuelled party ends in an explosive light show leaving the victims apparently electrocuted with odd scorch marks being the only evidence. While Maggie tries to make sense of the different stories sifting through what is real & what is hallucination she realises that the surviving teens are being targeted & systematically eliminated. Meanwhile on the East Coast Army colonel Benjamin Platt is at the scene of a deadly outbreak desperate to identify the pathogen that has infected children at a Virginia elementary school. Despite the miles that separate them the two cases collide as Maggie & Platt uncover secrets that were meant to stay hidden... ...