Grand Hotel

The basis for the Broadway play and Oscar-winning film: "Prefigures Downtown Abbey and Upstairs, Downstairs by examining multiple characters from different classes" (Shelf Awareness).

In Berlin's luxurious Grand Hotel, the lives of rich and famous guests play out in front of the all-seeing eyes of the humble porters, chambermaids, and desk clerks. Ballet dancer Grusinkaya fights her nerves—and aging face and body—before every performance for dwindling audiences. The handsome Baron Gaigern draws all eyes toward him as he strolls through the lobby, charming both the women and men he intends to deceive. Meanwhile, a dying bookkeeper leaves his meager existence behind to fill his last days with glamour and adventure, as, unbeknownst to him, his wealthy boss has checked in to try and save the business from ruin.

Behind the doors of the Grand Hotel's rooms, dramas of romance, desperation, loneliness, and despair unfold—until checkout time. Through the ever-spinning revolving door, former guests exit to return to their lives and new ones enter to see their fates intermingle—for better or worse . . .

"Vicki Baum renders human foibles at their most pathetic, despicable, and comical, then turns her characters inside out, until we recognize our own hopes and fears refracted in them." —Holly Brubach, former style editor for TheNew York Times Magazine

"A spiritual motion picture of modern life, the characteristics, the cross-currents of thought and emotion, of this new age." —J. B. Priestley, British novelist and playwright

"A fine and even brilliant novel . . . unusually exciting and most vividly told." —Sunday Times

"Done with acid and relentless perception and with a quite extraordinary tenderness of heart." —The Observer [UK]