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, an...

A luxury hotel in 1920s Berlin is a microcosm of modern society in this classic that inspired a hit Broadway musical and the classic film starring Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, and John Barrymore.“Prefigures Downtown Abbey and Upstairs, Downstairs by examining multiple characters from different classes.” —Shelf AwarenessThe luxury Grand Hotel is a revolving door for the stray souls of 1920s Berlin. Among the guests ...

Set in the first decade of the 20th century, this moving book shares the tragic reality of the Dutch invasion of Bali and the mass suicides that ensued.In Love and Death in Bali, renowned author Vicki Baum skillfully intermeshes several different narratives that all culminate in the infamous puputan (the "ending"), the slaughter and mass suicides that brought the old Bali to an end in 1906. Written within living memory of these bloody events, the ...

Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel is a timeless classic of 20th-century literature that captures the intersecting lives of strangers within the walls of Berlin’s most luxurious hotel. Behind the glittering façade of wealth and elegance, guests from different walks of life—an aging ballerina, a terminally ill bookkeeper, a charming but desperate baron, a ruthless businessman, and a hopeful young stenographer—cross paths in a series of encounters that reveal ambition, love, despair, and the fleeting ...

''Grand Hotel'' by Vicki Baum was first published in the original German in 1929 and then in this very successful English translation by Basil Creighton, published in 1930, and now public domain. A grand hotel in the center of 1920s Berlin serves as a microcosm of the modern world in Vicki Baum’s celebrated novel, a Weimar-era best seller that retains all its verve and luster today. Among the guests of the hotel is Doctor Otternschlag, a World War I veteran whose face has been sliced in ha...

Everyone comes to the Grand Hotel with a purpose. No one leaves the same.In a glittering Berlin luxury hotel, a handful of strangers arrive carrying private dreams and quiet desperation. A fading ballerina fights for one last moment in the spotlight. A powerful industrialist—facing death—searches for meaning beyond his fortune. A charming baron risks everything on love and luck. Around them, hotel staff move discreetly through the corridors, witnessing secrets they...

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Following a traumatic incident in London, journalist Jennifer Dorey has returned home to Guernsey, taking a job as a local newspaper reporter. When she finds a drowned woman on a beach, Jennifer uncovers something much bigger and more sinister than she first thought.Jennifer enlists the help of DCI Michael Gilbert, an officer on the verge of retirement, to investigate a pattern of similar deaths over the last fifty years. They follow a dark trail of island myths and folklore to the...

In prose that is darkly humorous and alive with detail, Valiant Gentlemen reimagines the lives and intimate friendships of humanitarian and Irish patriot Roger Casement; his closest friend, Herbert Ward; and Ward's extraordinary wife, the Argentinian-American heiress Sarita Sanford. Valiant Gentlemen takes the reader on an intimate journey, from Ward and Casement's misadventurous youth in the Congo—where, among other things, they bore witness to an Irish whiskey heir's ta...

On a chance visit to Plymouth Rock, Tony Horwitz makes an unsettling discovery. A history buff since early childhood, expensively educated at university—a history major, no less!—he’s reached middle age with a third-grader’s grasp of early America. In fact, he’s mislaid more than a century of American history, the period separating Columbus’s landing in 1492 from the arrival of English colonists at Jamestown in 160-something. Did nothing happen in between?Horwitz decides to find ou...

“All that can be done is for each one of us to invent our own ideal library of our classics.”—from Why Read the Classics?Classics, according to Italo Calvino, are not only works of enduring cultural value, but also something much more personal: talismans, touchstones, books through which we understand our world and ourselves. In Why Read the Classics?, Calvino shares over thirty of his classics in essays of warmth, humor, and striking insight.He ranges from Homer to Jorge L...

An unexpectedly uplifting account of women’s suffering and resilience in Stalin’s forced labor camps, diligently transcribed in the kitchens and living rooms of nine survivors.The pain inflicted by the gulags has cast a long shadow over Soviet-era history. Zgustova’s collection of interviews with former female prisoners not only chronicles the hardships of the camps, but also serves as testament to the power of beauty in the face of adversity.Where one would expect to find ...