Hotel Savoy

After three years in a Siberian prisoner-of-war camp, Gabriel Dan arrives in an Eastern European border town with a single purpose: to earn enough money to continue his journey west. His temporary stop is the Hotel Savoy, an imposing seven-story building. Exiles, failed artists, former soldiers, dancers, ruined merchants, and stateless dreamers are crammed into the squalid rooms on the upper floors. But in the lower salons, the city worships money and power, under the impenetrable gaze of an absent magnate who decides everyone's fate. With dazzling prose and an unflinching eye, Joseph Roth transforms this hotel into a mirror reflecting a Europe shattered after the Great War.