Hotel Savoy

Joseph Roth

Translated by John Hoare

‘”A pity,” says Abel Glanz, “it was a good hotel.”‘

Gabriel Dan is a former soldier in the Austrian Army who returns from a Siberian prison camp some time after the First World War. He arrives in an unnamed eastern town at the gates of Europe and lodges in the huge Hotel Savoy. The owner is absent, and the guests are odd, deranged, longing for salvation, dreaming of a release from the unbearable tensions of their lives. A former citizen who has made his fortune in the USA is rumoured to be on his way home – and murder and chaos ensue.

Written in 1923, Hotel Savoy is a dark, witty parable of Europe in the shadow of fascism and war: this is Roth at his best.

Joseph Roth is one of those rare and welcome talents whose concision and deceptive simplicity send the cogs of the imagination whizzing into overdrive

Sunday Telegraph

The Author

Joseph Roth (1894-1939) was the great elegist of the cosmopolitan, tolerant and doomed Central European culture that flourished in the dying days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Born into a Jewish family in Galicia, on the eastern edge of the empire, he was a prolific political journalist and novelist. On Hitler’s assumption of power, he was obliged to leave Germany for Paris, where he died in poverty a few years later. His books include What I Saw, Job, The White Cities, The String of Pearls, The Emperor’s Tomb and The Radetzky March, all published by Granta Books.

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