BEST BOOKS ON... HOTELS

AROUND the millennium, my parents spent a few years living in a hotel in the Middle East. My father was teaching at a university there, and renting a serviced maisonette in the beautifully maintained grounds of a quiet four-star Hilton was the easiest accommodation option.

For a regular visitor like me, it presented few disadvantages: a cleaner came every day, the hotel had three tranquil pools, a gym and, if nobody felt like cooking in the kitchenette, six restaurants, including an excellent Lebanese one.

Best of all, my mother got to know a lot of the staff, recruited from across the Middle and Far East, quite well.

When their first grandchild visited, enormous fuss was made of him. When my parents returned for a holiday a couple of years later, a staff line-up welcomed them back and they were extravagantly upgraded. It really was a sweet spot.

They are intriguing places, hotels: fascinating for people-watching, transitory for most of their guests, but not for their staff and owners.

The first- person narrator of Graham Greene’s gripping thriller The Comedians — set in Haiti, in the era of Papa Doc Duvalier and his sinister enforcers the Tonton Macoute — is a British hotelier, Brown, saddled with a once-destination, now forlorn establishment, in a dangerously febrile climate.

In Anita Brookner’s wryly funny Hotel Du Lac, romantic writer Edith Hope has been exiled to out-of-season Switzerland by her friends, following a torrid affair with a married man. ‘For I am not to be allowed my lapse,’ she muses.

Amor Towles’ recent literary bestseller, A Gentleman In Moscow begins in 1922, in Bolshevik Russia, in one of the few places the revolution has not fully infiltrated — The Grand Metropol Hotel, opposite the Kremlin. There, Count Rostov is under seemingly permanent house arrest.

Over the holidays, my family enjoyed a few nights at a hotel on the North Devon coast and spent a long weekend — with my parents — at an old Scottish favourite as the last hurrah of our summer.

If you have saved your holidays until now, then enjoy!