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Hotel Exile
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  • Published: 26 February 2026
  • ISBN: 9781837311910
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $32.00
Categories:

Hotel Exile

Paris in the Shadow of War

Formats & editions
Tr. Paperback
3 Mar 2026
EBook
26 Feb 2026
Audiobook
26 Feb 2026
Hardback
26 Mar 2026
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The story of one Paris hotel in the 1930s and 1940s: the home of the literary avant-garde, then German military intelligence, then survivors of the death camps

The Hotel Lutetia is a Paris institution, the only ‘grand’ hotel on the city’s bohemian Left Bank. Ever since it opened, it has served as a meeting place for artists, musicians and politicians. André Gide took his lunch here, James Joyce lived in one of its rooms, Picasso and Matisse were regular guests. It has a darker history, too. During one short period, it became a focus for some of the most dramatic and terrible events in recent history.

In the 1930s the Hotel Lutetia attracted intellectuals and political activists, forced to flee their homes when Hitler came to power, who met here with the hope of forming an alternative government. But when war came, Paris was occupied, and the hotel became the headquarters of the German military intelligence service – and the centre of their operation to root out enemies of the Reich. In 1945, the Lutetia was requisitioned once more, this time transformed into a reception centre for deportees returning from concentration camps.

Hotel Exile is about what happens on the edges of a war. At its heart are three groups of people connected to a place, to one another, and to the dark ideology which dictates the course of their lives. A masterpiece of empathy and concision, Jane Rogoyska’s extraordinary new book offers us a vision of individual human beings desperately trying to find a path through some of the twentieth century’s most devastating events.
  • Published: 26 February 2026
  • ISBN: 9781837311910
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $32.00
Categories:

About the author

Jane Rogoyska

Jane Rogoyska is the author of Surviving Katyn: Stalin’s Polish Massacre and the Search for Truth, Gerda Taro: Inventing Robert Capa and the novel Kozlowski.
JR

Praise for Hotel Exile

Hotel Exile is an extraordinary account of a Parisian institution which became a stage set for the terror, tension and triumph of the Second World War. Its staff and guests are thrilling players in an utterly compelling account that sheds important new light on a seemingly familiar episode of modern history

Richard Ovenden

Rogoyska proves such a fresh, astute and unaffected writer that there’s not a dull page, so vividly is the drama of it all communicated… A hauntingly vivid account

Rupert Christiansen, Literary Review

[An] exceptional work of non-fiction – you couldn’t just call it a history book, it’s more than that … Rogoyska captures the historical moment with a rare combination of urgency and empathy … [She] has trawled memoirs from hotel staff and ex-officers, unearthing stories that are peculiarly resonant … This is a scintillatingly good book. I think it will win prizes – not least because it is subtly experimental … It slips in and out of the present tense like a contemporary novel … It feels thrillingly immersive. In fact, I’ve rarely felt such a sense of the historical moment. Or indeed the present moment. Because if ever a book were about now as well as then, it’s this one.

James McConnachie, The Sunday Times

Impressive and original... vivid and thoroughly researched... a masterclass

Spectator

A devastating and ­memorable account of lives thrown into upheaval by Nazism

Irish Independent

Beautifully written ... this is a compelling book full of lessons we may not wish to hear

Country Life

Poignant and richly layered

History of War magazine

Powerful

Mail on Sunday