The Hotel

Elizabeth Bowen's first novel brilliantly captures the inflammatory mixture of passion and repression among British tourists on the Italian Riviera in the 1920s.

The aftermath of the first World War haunts the background of Elizabeth Bowen's remarkable first novel. A luxurious seaside hotel on the Riviera, filled with a cast of well-heeled and often comic English vacationers, seems a closed and comfortable world, marked by dramas no more momentous than tennis games, picnics, and idle gossip....