Five top novels set in hotels

Lucy Foley studied English literature at Durham University and University College London and worked for several years as a fiction editor in the publishing industry.

Her novels include The Paris Apartment, The Guest List, and The Midnight Feast. She lives in London.

All hotels are worlds unto themselves, [Foley writes at the Waterstones blog] tiny universes that follow their own rules and logic. In a murder mystery setting, practically speaking, a hotel ringfences the characters and provides a stage upon which the drama can play out, slightly elevated and separate from the ordinary world. Hotels also provide a modern formulation of the upstairs/ downstairs dynamic so beloved of the whodunnit, a forum in which class tensions can be put under the microscope. And yet they’re also, in another sense, oddly democratic: anyone can stay in a hotel (so long as they can afford the price of a stay!) and become a different or improved version of themselves, freed from the baggage of ordinary life.

One of Foley's five top novels set in a hotel:

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

In this gorgeously written book (to be honest I’d happily read Amor Towles’ shopping list), a hotel becomes a gilded cage for former aristocrat Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, who is sentenced to live out his days within the walls of the Metropol. It’s no easy ask, maintaining the reader’s interest in a plot set almost entirely within one building, but Towles creates a rich and absorbing world full of intrigue and life – and allows us to spend time in the company of one of modern fiction’s most charming characters.

Read about another title on Foley's list.

A Gentleman in Moscow is among Courtney Rodgers's best historical fiction of the 21st century so far and Suzanne Redfearn's six architecturally inspired novels.

--Marshal Zeringue