“Wonderful reading…. Vaill’s writing is light-footed, immediate, and intimate [and her] account of the war and its voluntary witnesses validates our need for narrative in the face of atrocity — something beyond propaganda, and, at times, as necessary as food or shelter.” New York Times Book Review
Hotel Florida
Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War
- A New York Times Book Review Notable Book
- Seattle Times Best Books of 2014
- Kansas City Star 100 Best Books of 2014
- Foreign rights sold to ten publishers
Madrid, 1936: In a city blasted by the civil war that will serve as a dress-rehearsal for World War II, six people meet and find their lives changed forever.
Ernest Hemingway, his career and marriage stalled, hopes that this war will give him fresh material and a new romance; Martha Gellhorn, an ambitious novice journalist hungry for love and experience, thinks she will find both with Hemingway in Spain.
Robert Capa and Gerda Taro, idealistic young photographers based in Paris, want to capture history in the making, and are inventing modern photojournalism in the process.
And Arturo Barea, chief of Madrid’s foreign press office, and Ilsa Kulcsar, his Austrian deputy, are struggling to balance truth-telling with loyalty to their sometimes compromised cause — a struggle that places both of them at risk of their lives.
Tracing the tangled wartime destinies of these three couples — and a host of supporting characters — against the backdrop of a critical moment in history, Amanda Vaill has created a narrative of love and reinvention that is, finally, a story about truth: finding it out, telling it, and — maybe — living it, and what that effort costs. ▣
Praise for Hotel Florida
“Hotel Florida is just a great read, [set in] a messy, complicated period, a story about shades of grey, idealism, guts and grit in the middle of a war.” Former Secretary of State John Kerry, Bloomberg
“Amanda Vaill’s new book is a stunner. Cinematic in scope and detail, it is fully as engrossing as a novel. Vividly written and impeccably researched, Hotel Florida animates a fascinating cast of historical figures, speaking urgently to questions of truth and betrayal that are still compelling today. What a story!” Mary Dearborn, author of Ernest Hemingway
“Captures heartache and obsession on a vast but intimate scale before the era of national-security states.” Taylor Branch, author of The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement
“A riveting tale of politics, propaganda, and indifference, told with conviction and real heart. Don’t miss it.” Brenda Wineapple, author of Ecstatic Nation and White Heat
“Vivid… heartbreaking… beautifully told, Vaill’s story captures the timeless immediacy of warfront reporting with the universal struggle to stay in love, just before the Nazis permanently changed the European landscape.” Publishers Weekly
“Dense, readable… a vivid, well-paced story of the awfulness of war and the complex motives of those who report on it.” Wall Street Journal
“Moving and illuminating…[a] stirring assemblage of history, archival scholarship and imaginative redramatization…..Like Shakespeare, Vaill knows that history isn’t written without tragedy… If you’ve never cried over a biography or history, Hotel Florida might be your first weeper with an index.” National Post (Toronto)
“[An] ambitious history [that] uses romantic and artistic misadventures to unfold a larger canvas of war and ideology.” The New Yorker
“Extraordinary… brilliantly written.” La Razon (Spain)
“Romantic… kaleidoscopic… [D]elves deeply into the lives of three couples whose chronicling of the war shaped public perception [and] adds to the cold hard facts — as well as the enduring mystique — of the Spanish Civil War.” Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air, NPR
“Spirited and eye-opening…ripple[s] with excitement, doom, courage, betrayal, defeat, and, of course, love. Vaill’s book races forward like a novel, even as it provides a lucid account of a hugely complex and sometimes baffling war.” Kansas City Star
“Magical and meticulous… [Hotel Florida] is a masterful reconstruction of one of the most tumultuous conflicts in 20th Century Europe.” Jane Ciabattari, BBC.com
- 2014
- Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Formats
- Hardcover, Paperback, Audio, Digital