The Hotel Neversink
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4.3 • 10 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A 2020 Edgar Award Winner!
"A gripping, atmospheric, heart-breaking, almost-ghost story. Not since Stephen King's Overlook has a hotel hiding a secret been brought to such vivid life." —Lydia Kiesling, author of The Golden State
Thirty-one years after workers first broke ground, the magnificent Hotel Neversink in the Catskills finally opens to the public. Then a young boy disappears.
This mysterious vanishing—and the ones that follow—will brand the lives of three generations. At the root of it all is Asher Sikorsky, the ambitious and ruthless patriarch whose purchase of the hotel in 1931 set a haunting legacy into motion. His daughter Jeanie sees the Hotel Neversink into its most lucrative era, but also its darkest. Decades later, Asher's grandchildren grapple with the family’s heritage in their own ways: Len fights to keep the failing, dilapidated hotel alive, and Alice sets out to finally uncover the murderer’s identity.
Told by an unforgettable chorus of Sikorsky family members—a matriarch, a hotel maid, a traveling comedian, the hotel detective, and many others—The Hotel Neversink is the gripping portrait of a Jewish family in the Catskills over the course of a century. With an unerring eye and with prose both comic and tragic, Adam O’Fallon-Price details one man’s struggle for greatness, no matter the cost, and a long-held family secret that threatens to undo it all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Centered on a rambling hotel in the Catskills, the striking latest from Price (The Grand Tour) is part multigenerational saga, part murder mystery. In 1950, a young boy, Jonah, goes missing from the Hotel Neversink, and his disappearance kicks off a string of similar crimes that stretch across decades. The owners of the hotel, the Sikorsky family, avert scandal, until Jonah's remains are discovered in the hotel's basement in 1973. With no obvious suspects, the Sikorskys suffer the ups and downs of running a business associated with an unsolved murder, entertaining crime buffs and conspiracy theorists while the hotel passed down from patriarch, Asher, to his daughter, Jeanie, and eventually to his grandson, Len slowly loses its luster with vacationers, despite Len's dedication to keeping the family business alive. Price focuses each chapter on a single character, which gives the work a novel-in-stories feel that periodically drifts from the hotel. As a result, the central mystery moves into the background, yet it never fully vanishes, wearing on characters without their acknowledgement as they face marital strain, addiction, and depression. Price is a sharp writer, and his novel wonderfully critiques family obligation while simultaneously delivering a crafty, sinister whodunit.
