AustLit

'The Hotel Swiss-Touring is the refuge for a group of cosmopolitan characters who come together in Switzerland after the Second World War. Their object is to conceal themselves from money-hungry governments and hostile master races. But their common purpose doesn't prevent a microcosm of jealousies, spitefulness, vindictiveness and mistrust from developing among the small group, all under the relentless eye of Madame Bonnard. ' (Publication summary)

'This last great work by one of the century’s great writers is a large and original novel of betrayal and self-delusion, madness and consuming passions, that recreates to chilling effect the political turbulence of the American Left and the clamor and menace of the McCarthy Right. Not since her classic The Man Who Loved Children has Stead fashioned such willful and memorable characters as Emily Wilks and Stephen Howard. Emily is a woman of enormous but mercurial enthusiasms whose unflagging ebullience masks a darkness that will lead to disaster. Stephen—handsome, clever, spoiled—is a dangerous dreamer, an upper-class dropout playing at radical politics. Together, they mirror the times through which they live: the heady revolutionary fervor of the Depression, the short collaborative effort of wartime America, the fractiousness of the Cold War years.' (Publication summary)