Hotel Exile

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2026 WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION

"This is a scintillatingly good book. . . . Thrillingly immersive. . . . 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

“A rich collection of personal stories. . . . The result is an almost cinematic account that will, for many readers, connect figures and episodes in a new way.” —Financial Times

This is the story of how one hotel became a place of escape, a place of war, and a place of sanctuary.

A hotel is not an actor in a drama but the stage upon which dramas unfold.

The Hotel Lutetia is a Paris institution—the only grand hotel on the city's bohemian Left Bank. Since its opening in 1905, it has been a meeting place for artists, intellectuals, musicians, and politicians. But in the years before, during, and after the second World War, the hotel had a darker, more tragic history—a place in the shadow of Nazism. 

Set in Paris from 1933 to 1945, Hotel Exile recounts the real stories whose lives intersected at the famed Lutetia over the course of 12 transformative years. From artists and intellectuals fleeing Nazi Germany, including Walter Benjamin, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett; to German counterintelligence officers who commandeered the hotel during the Occupation; and finally, Holocaust survivors and displaced persons who found refuge there after Liberation, Jane Rogoyska brings to life the emotions, dilemmas, and fates of outsiders existing on the edges of war. Rogoyska explores what it meant for three profoundly different groups to live in exile, while passing through the doors of a normally functioning hotel, a site under occupation, and finally, a shelter and place of healing. Vital and tragic, Hotel Exile interweaves portraits of people connected by race, nationality, language, and a legendary Paris establishment, under the dark ideology that dictated the course of lives around the world.