How long is it?
192 pages in the Vintage 1995 paperback edition.
Reading facts
✓ Checked- Reading effort
- 41 / 100Moderate
- Length
- 192 pagesVintage · 1995
- Reading time
- 3 h 45 minat 50 pages an hour ·
- Pace
- Measured
- Emotional intensity
- 3 / 5
About 3 h 45 min · at 30 minutes a day, about 8 days
Estimated from the page count of this edition. Dense books can take longer than the estimate.
About the book
Sent away by London friends embarrassed by her love life, romance novelist Edith Hope spends September at a hotel on Lake Geneva, where she is supposed to recover her respectable habits. She works on a manuscript and writes unsent letters to her married lover, David, while becoming drawn into the lives of her fellow guests. Among them is Mr. Neville, whose interest in Edith interrupts the solitude her friends prescribed.
Reader notes
Quiet, dryly funny and occupied with loneliness and respectability, the literary novel proceeds largely through conversations, letters and Edith's private observations. Its pace is leisurely, and small social exchanges carry much of the action.
How it reads
- Writing style
- Descriptive · Witty
- Tone
- Detached · Melancholic · Reflective · Wistful
- Driven by
- Atmosphere · Character · Ideas
- Point of view
- Third person, limited
Reading complexity
- Writing
- 4 / 5
- Ideas
- 3 / 5
- Structure
- 2 / 5
- Background knowledge
- 1 / 5
About this profile
Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).
- Writing
- How much attention the sentences and language require.
- Ideas
- How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
- Structure
- How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
- Background knowledge
- Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
- Emotional intensity
- Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.
Themes
- Freedom
- Gender
- Identity
- Isolation
- Love
- Marriage
Content notes
- Violence
- Mild
- Sexual content
- Mild
- Swearing
- None
- Substance use
- Mild
- Abuse
- Mild
- Self-harm or suicide
- None
Standing and awards
Canonical
- Booker Prize, 1984
- Los Angeles Times Book Prizes finalist, 1985
- Everyman's Library
Questions readers ask
Which edition is shown here?
Vintage · 1995 · Paperback. ISBN 9780679759324.
How long does it take to read Hotel Du Lac?
About 3 hours 45 minutes at 50 pages an hour, based on the 192-page Vintage edition. Dense books can take longer.
About the author
Anita Brookner
Anita Brookner was an English novelist and art historian whose fiction concentrates on intelligent, middle-class women negotiating solitude, emotional loss, and the pressure to accept socially approved lives. Her prose is controlled, observant, and often wry, with plots that advance through close scrutiny, disappointed expectations, and quiet compromises rather than dramatic incident. In A Start in Life, Ruth Weiss measures experience against patterns learned from literature while family obligations narrow her independence. Hotel du Lac places romance novelist Edith Hope among the guests of a restrained Swiss hotel, where her watchful assessments of other people gradually sharpen the question posed by an offer of secure but unequal marriage. Brookner published her first novel at fifty-three.
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Edition and details
- Publisher
- Vintage
- Publication year
- 1995
- Format
- Paperback
- Pages
- 192
- ISBN
- 9780679759324
- Edition language
- English
- Original language
- English
- First published
- 1984
- Genres and form
- Fiction · Novel · Literary Fiction · Literary fiction · Psychological fiction
- Editions
- 16
- Languages
- 3 (German, English, Unspecified)