Women's Hotel
ONE OF FALL'S MOST ANTICIPATED READS--New York Times, Vulture, BookPage, Kirkus Reviews, and more
From the New York Times bestselling author and advice columnist, a poignant and funny debut novel about the residents of a women's hotel in 1960s New York City.
The Beidermeier might be several rungs lower on the ladder than the real-life Barbizon, but its residents manage to occupy one another nonetheless. There's Katherine, the first-floor manager, lightly cynical and more than lightly suggestible. There's Lucianne, a workshy party girl caught between the love of comfort and an instinctive bridling at convention, Kitty the sponger, Ruth the failed hairdresser, and Pauline the typesetter. And there's Stephen, the daytime elevator operator and part-time Cooper Union student.
The residents give up breakfast, juggle competing jobs at rival presses, abandon their children, get laid off from the telephone company, attempt to retrain as stenographers, all with the shared awareness that their days as an institution are numbered, and they'd better make the most of it while it lasts.
As trenchant as the novels of Dawn Powell and Rona Jaffe and as immersive as The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Lessons in Chemistry, Women's Hotel is a modern classic--and it is very, very funny.
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Daniel M. Lavery is a former "Dear Prudence" advice columnist at Slate, the cofounder of The Toast, and the New York Times-bestselling author of Texts from Jane Eyre, The Merry Spinster, and Something That May Shock and Discredit You. He also writes the popular newsletter The Chatner. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
"I cannot imagine a more perfect use of an afternoon than reading this book." -- Helen Rosner, The New Yorker
"[E]very character is distinct and their backstories, misadventures, and little victories intertwine skillfully. Lavery has a wonderful ear for a period turn-of-phrase and his prose glitters with humor and affection for human foibles. ... Readers will be hard-pressed not to read sections aloud to passersby. ... [A] stay at the Biedermeier is pure pleasure." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"There is a delicious, low-key madness to this project, but Women's Hotel is undertaken with such gusto--and, frequently, such skill--that the reader has no choice but to surrender. ... There is addiction and poverty and aching loneliness, the pain and joy of midcentury queerness, along with a description of a terrible, misleading haircut that's one of the better things I've read this year. ... Lavery never thinks less of his characters for the mistake of having been born in an era not our own, making Women's Hotel a welcome place to stay." -- New York Times Book Review
"Through sentences of remarkable elegance, humor and complexity of phrase ... Lavery vividly imagines a 1960s women's hotel in his debut novel ... in a style reminiscent of contemporary wordsmiths Nathan Hill and James McBride." -- BookPage (starred review)
"Appealingly offbeat. ... Lavery colorfully captures the hotel in the last glimmers of its heyday and brings the misfit residents to life. ... Readers will find much to savor." -- Publishers Weekly
"Lavery's elegant, aching, and outright hilarious prose highlights the lives of these women as they find and lose jobs, upend their entire lives, make friends and forge bonds that, despite the transitory nature of the hotel, will last a lifetime. ... Women's Hotel is a prime example of mastery of a craft; readers will want to devour it in a single sitting." -- Booklist
"[A] close and loving exploration of a very particular time and place." -- Library Journal
"A slice-of-life comedy ... [Lavery's] humor, curiosity and empathy lend themselves perfectly to this charming subject matter." -- BookPage
"Fans of dearly departed website the Toast will long be familiar with Daniel Lavery's penchant for humorous turns of phrase and his distinctly literary imagination. In his debut novel, Lavery turns that sensibility to the brief phenomenon of women's hotels ... delightfully offbeat." -- Vulture
"A newly sober floor manager with a millinery conundrum, a lesbian bartender and an elevator operator whose palms must be greased on moving days are among the cast of unique characters whose entertaining dramas over minor rules of social interactions read like Emily Post on her second martini." -- Washington Post
"A finely wrought and funny group portrait." -- Vanity Fair
"The most winning quality of Women's Hotel is Lavery's humor, particularly as it manifests in satirical commentary. ... Women's Hotel reads like a confection at the outset. But its portraits of women striving--be it for success, for survival, for love or friendship ... are affecting beyond what one might initially expect. It bursts with life." -- BookBrowse
"Writer Daniel M. Lavery models the women's hotel in his new novel after the Barbizon, a mainstay of young New York women on the go. His hotel the Beidermeier is a tad seedier, but bursting with stories about gals on the way down and on the way up and on the way out, as you might well imagine. Cue the TV series, if I know my streaming services." -- Parade
"Women's Hotel has an unexpected commonality with Seinfield, which is about 'nothing, ' but actually is a canny and compulsively entertaining examination of the quirks, misunderstanding, stratagems, assumptions, social connections, and cultural pulse of friends bound by time and circumstance in a very specific part of New York." -- Electric Literature
"You might think as you begin reading that you have in your hands a Wodehousian comedy of manners, but you soon realize you are being drawn into a series of quiet but devastatingly poignant lives--as if Tolstoy or Naipaul or Austen had put a specific slice of middle-class single womanhood in the mid-20th century under a microscope. ... [Lavery] offers in his debut novel a dreamlike, richly detailed glimpse into lives that are ordinary but no less fascinating for being so." -- Historical Novels Review
"Deeply funny and keenly observant ... Women's Hotel would make for a great streaming series...or, at the very least, your next book club read." -- The Skimm
