The White Hotel: Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 1981

Description

It is a dream of electrifying eroticism and inexplicable violence, recounted by a young woman to her analyst, Sigmund Freud. It is a horrifying yet restrained narrative of the Holocaust. It is a searing vision of the wounds of our century, and an attempt to heal them. Interweaving poetry and case history, fantasy and historical truth-telling, THE WHITE HOTEL is a modern classic of enduring emotional power that attempts nothing less than to reconcile the notion of individual destiny with that of historical fate. 'I quickly came to feel that I had found that book, that mythical book, that would explain us to ourselves' Leslie Epstein, New York Times

DM Thomas was born in Cornwall in 1935. After reading English at New College, Oxford, he became a teacher until he became a full-time writer. His novels include The Flute-Player, Ararat, Swallow, Sphinx, Summit, Flying into Love and Eating Pavlova. He has also published memoirs, several volumes of poetry and translations of Pushkin and Anna Akhmatova. He now lives in Cornwall.

A novel of blazing imaginative and intellectual force -- Salman Rushdie To describe this novel as spine-tingling in its indescribable poetic effect would be to trivialize its profoundly tragic theme. Say then that it is heart-stunning * The New York Times * Astonishing ... A forthright sensuality mixed with a fine historical feeling for the nightmare moments in modern history, a dreamlike fluidity and quickness -- John Updike A dazzler that lingers in the mind * People * A remarkable and original novel ... there is no novel to my knowledge which resembles this in technique or ideas. It stands alone -- Graham Greene This novel is a reminder that fiction can amaze * Time * Precise, troubling, brilliant * Observer *