Leaving Small’s Hotel

Small’s Hotel, on a little island off Long Island, is where Peter and his wife, Albertine, have spent most of their adult lives. Albertine runs the hotel while Peter works quietly on his memoirs, but the future of the hotel, and of every gift Peter dreams of giving Albertine, is in jeopardy. 

Business has fallen off and the old hotel is falling down. Bills are mounting. Foreclosure looms.

What Peter does to save the hotel, his marriage, and possibly his life involves storytelling, friendship, memory, ghostwriting, real-estate, electrical contraptions, and great, abiding love. 

“A compact comic Decameron, a deadpan fantasia . . . one of the most delightful novels of the decade.”

     Kirkus Reviews

“With his customary elegance, Kraft has written a coda to the utopian impulses that lurk in the heart of our century.” 

     Publishers Weekly

“Kraft’s take on the national experience is thoughtful,disturbing, and unlike that of any other American writer.”

     Anthony Brandt, Men’s Journal

“Kraft's imagination, like [Peter] Leroy's, is endlessly fertile, not merely in its creations but in its connections, as well, so that each apparently innocent anecdote chimes with Kraft’s broader theme of the imagined life, of its thrilling, enhancing, and ultimately dangerous connection to the real.”

     Claire Messud, Newsday

“The belief has long been held here that Eric Kraft is one of our best writers, and Leaving Small’s Hotel reinforces it.” 

     Roger Harris, Newark Star-Ledger

“Refreshingly complex and searching.”

     Mahinder Kingra, City Paper (Baltimore) 

“A wonderful matryoshka of a novel . . . with just the sort of spectacular intricacy that makes a business fail and a 

novel fly.”

     The New Yorker