Hotel Exile cover art

Hotel Exile

Paris in the Face of Fascism and the Shadow of War, 1933-1945

Preview

Get 30 days of Standard free

£5.99/mo after trial. Cancel monthly.
Try for £0.00
More purchase options

Hotel Exile

By: Jane Rogoyska
Narrated by: Jane Rogoyska
Try for £0.00

£5.99 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for £17.25

Buy Now for £17.25

LIMITED TIME OFFER

£0.99/mo for 3 months - terms apply. Offer ends 31 August 2026.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2026 WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION • A Foyles Top Ten Read for February • A 2026 Highlight in The Financial TimesEvening Standard The Bookseller

"This is a scintillatingly good book. . . . Thrillingly immersive. . . . I’ve rarely felt such a sense of the historical moment. Or indeed the present moment. Because if ever a book were about now as well as then, it’s this one." —The Sunday Times

This is the story of how one hotel became a place of escape, a place of war, and a place of sanctuary.


A hotel is not an actor in a drama but the stage upon which dramas unfold.

The Hotel Lutetia is a Paris institution—the only grand hotel on the city's bohemian Left Bank. Since its opening in 1910, it has been a meeting place for artists, intellectuals, musicians, and politicians. But in the years before, during, and after the second World War, the hotel had a darker, more tragic history—a place in the shadow of Nazism.

Set in Paris from 1933 to 1945, Hotel Exile recounts the real stories whose lives intersected at the famed Lutetia over the course of 12 transformative years. From artists and intellectuals fleeing Nazi Germany, including Walter Benjamin, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett; to German counterintelligence officers who commandeered the hotel during the Occupation; and finally, Holocaust survivors and displaced persons who found refuge there after Liberation, Jane Rogoyska brings to life the emotions, dilemmas, and fates of outsiders existing on the edges of war. Rogoyska explores what it meant for three profoundly different groups to live in exile, while passing through the doors of a normally functioning hotel, a site under occupation, and finally, a shelter and place of healing. Vital and tragic, Hotel Exile interweaves portraits of people connected by race, nationality, language, and a legendary Paris establishment, under the dark ideology that dictated the course of lives around the world.
20th Century Emigration & Immigration Military Modern Social Sciences War Imperialism Celebrity
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
No reviews yet