The Hotel

Elizabeth Bowens first novel brilliantly captures the inflammatory mixture of passion and repression among well-heeled British tourists on the Italian Riviera. Their luxurious seaside hotel seems a closed and comfortable world marked by dramas no more momentous than tennis games picnics and idle gossip. But for the young women of the 1920s facing a dearth of young men after the first World War it is a battleground for the clash of tradition and modernity. As rebellious young Sydney Warren tests the boundaries of her incomplete freedomand becomes obsessed with a clever and charming older womanshe increasingly bewilders her suitors her handlers and herself. With the psychological precision and command of atmosphere that marks Bowens most famous novelsThe Hoteldepicts a collection of privileged men and women in determined denial of a world that is falling apart around them.