Status
Available
Call number
Genres
Publication
Picador (2015), Edition: Main Market Ed.
Description
Three decades ago, the charismatic Howard York built the empire of his dreams: the Hotel Alpha. It was once the finest in London, but over the years, as the world around it has moved on at an ever more dizzying rate, the hotel has struggled to keep pace. Graham, the Alpha's concierge, has been behind the front desk since the day the hotel opened and has witnessed every stage of its history. Chaz, Howard's blind adopted son, has almost never ventured outside its walls. Both of them view the Alpha as their sanctuary, the place that gives them everything they need. But both of them must now accept that the Alpha no longer offers them the life they most want, and that Howard's vision has been built on secrets as well as dreams . . .
User reviews
LibraryThing member dtw42
Well, that was different (for me at least): I think I expected that a novel by someone I know of as a comedian would be jokey – but it really isn’t. A four-decade sage a love and loss, secrets and lies. The butterfly effect (or as Douglas Adams would put it, the fundamental interconnectedness
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of all things) wherein a spur-of-the-moment moment decision or one made for selfish reasons can have huge long-term consequences for the lives of others. It all centres on the charismatic showman hotelier Howard York, as narrated in alternate chapters by his concierge/confidant, the steadfastly old-fashioned Graham Adam, and by the boy Chas, orphaned and blinded as a toddler by a fire in the hotel and subsequently adopted and raised by York. Their lives in and around the central-London Hotel are buffeted in various directions by the rise of the computer and the Internet, the New York and London terrorist attacks, and the London Olympic bid, and the ways all these events affect the actions and reactions of their different personalities, and the lives of the people they care for. Show Less
LibraryThing member Triduana
This was enjoyable enough as a quick read. I never found that the pace of the story changed though, and there were quite a few chapters / passages where nothing really happened. I thought Chas's story was a good one and I wish the story had focussed more on him, because I found Graham a little bit
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forgettable, and as though the story would have been just the same without him in it. I also wasn't sure if the main message of the story was about the things that go on in hotels, or about the progress of technology, which was a theme of the book that gradually took over, and I would have preferred it if it had stayed about the hotel and the human elements of the story. On the whole it wasn't a bad book, but I feel that there was something missing. Show Less
Original language
English
Physical description
5.12 inches
ISBN
1447243331 / 9781447243335