- Title:
- Hotel Alpha
- By:
- Mark Watson
- Pages:
- 400
- Rating:
- 4
Three decades ago, Howard York founded the most extraordinary hotel in London: the Hotel Alpha. A self-made man, Howard believes that you create your own luck – and when he is in the room, there is a sense that anything is possible.
Graham, the concierge, has been behind the Alpha’s front desk since the day the hotel opened and knows everything about it. Chas, Howard’s blind adopted son, has almost never ventured outside its walls. Both of them believe that the Alpha gives them everything they need – until two mysterious disappearances raise questions that no one seems willing to answer. As the years forge ahead, Graham and Chas must ask themselves whether Howard’s vision of the perfect hotel has been built on secrets as well as dreams . . .
Captivating, brilliant and full of surprises, Hotel Alpha is an ingenious novel about the incidental and life-changing ways in which we connect with one another. You can discover more about the hotel and its inhabitants in one hundred extra stories that expand the world of the novel and can be found at the Hotel Alpha Stories website.
I really enjoyed Eleven, so when the chance came to get a new Watson I couldn’t say no. This had an elegant piquancy to it, a sort of nostalgic warmth as it moves from an older, perhaps more respectable time into contemporary Britain. I have yet to read the other stories surrounding the work, of course I will do that; so the ending to me left things a little unanswered but certainly not unsatisfying, because you don’t read this sort of book for a climactic ending, you read it for the atmosphere and that was there in spades.