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Andy Miller is the author of ‘the Year of Reading Dangerously’ and the host of the Backlisted Podcast. We asked him to look through his bookshelves in search of the hotel in literature. He brings us the hotel as seen by the staff in the short story ‘A Dedicated Man’ by Elizabeth Taylor and the ‘excellent hotel’ at the centre of Anita Brookner’s Booker Prize Winning novel ‘Hotel du Lac’.

Roger Luckhurst is the author of ‘Corridors: Passages of Modernity’. He explains how is interest in the corridor as more than a way of getting from a to b began with writing about The Shining, and how Stanley Kubrick created one of the mot enduring corridors in fiction in the Overlook hotel. We also meet the hotel detectives and find out about ‘Monster hotels’ and ‘Corridor Dread’. Roger Luckhurst is Professor in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck. 

In Eimear McBride’s new novel ‘Strange Hotel’, we travel around the world, from Paris to Prague to Auckland, but remain firmly in a serious of near-identical hotel rooms with an unnamed woman who finds herself struggling to keep her thoughts at bay. Eimear McBride won the Goldsmith’s Prize and the Bailey’s Prize for her debut novel ‘A Girl is  Half-formed Thing’, and the James Tait Black award for The Lesser Bohemians. All her books are published by Faber.