The Girl from the Grand Hotel
-
- $15.99
-
- $15.99
Publisher Description
The #1 bestselling author of Cooking for Picasso and The Godmothers returns with The Girl from the Grand Hotel, a dazzling historical novel that brings readers into the glamorous world of the first (and doomed) Cannes Film Festival and the deadly atmosphere of Europe on the brink of war.
Summer, 1939. The glittering Côte d’Azur is having a particularly brilliant season, as the world’s wealthiest vacationers collide with Hollywood’s illustrious movie stars for the first-ever film festival on the French Riviera.
Into this hothouse playground comes an American named Annabel Faucon. Having left a dead-end job and a broken heart back in New York, she’s escaped to a summer stint at the fabulous Grand Hotel, where her uncle is the manager. But when a major movie studio brings its flock of stars to stay at the hotel, Annabel is handpicked to “keep an eye on” two of the mysterious arrivals: a screenwriter who’s been “in his cups” and a renegade actor who keeps luring the studio’s female star into his independent productions.
The arrival of Nazi guests only intensifies the situation. Suddenly everyone is watching everybody else during this feverish last summer before the outbreak of World War II. Faced with international spies who will stop at nothing to get what they want, Annabel finds herself embroiled in murder, intrigue, and a race against the clock to disrupt a secret Nazi communications system.
Inspired by true events and the histories of three great hotels on the Côte d’Azur—with appearances by such real-life luminaries as Marlene Dietrich, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Cagney, and Mae West—The Girl from the Grand Hotel is a brilliant page-turner that is not to be missed.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Aubray's fun and surprising third novel (after 2021's The Godmothers) follows a 20-year-old American woman on the French Riviera during the birth of the Cannes Film Festival in summer 1939. Earlier in the year, Annabel Faucon faced the untimely deaths of her mother and father, from the flu and a heart attack, respectively. Her uncle JP, who manages the Grand Hôtel du Cap des Rêves, invites her to visit and offers her a job typing up scripts for F. Scott Fitzgerald, who befriends Annabel and warns her about fickle Hollywood types. Annabel also acts as a translator and tour guide for matinee idol Jack Cabot and his German actor girlfriend Téa Marlo. Annabel quickly falls for Jack, who's trying to scout locations to make his own film. The initial two-thirds of the novel verge on frothy escapism as Annabel hobnobs with the rich and famous, who conveniently take a shine to her, but all the while Aubray has set the stage for deeper themes of exploitation, the reach of fascism, and the limits of political loyalty, as Téa is frequently courted by Nazi officials who want her to do favors for their regime and Jack schemes to make Annabel a star. Readers will be swept away.
