"Christmas At The Women's Hotel" Is Coming Out in October 2025

Buy it now, if you like!

“Christmas meant work, and work meant money. During ordinary times, employment came to the inhabitants of New York’s Biedermeier Hotel for Women fitfully, reluctantly, and often only after tremendous exertion (when it came at all), but between the feasts of All Saints in November and Epiphany in January, nearly any girl who wished for something profitable to occupy her afternoons could make her choice almost at her leisure. The city was lousy with opportunity in winter, and for an almost three-month period practically every department store, boutique, and commercial concern was absolutely desperate for girls.”

If you liked Women’s Hotel (my first novel, which came out in October in 2024), then I have terrific news for you: a sequel novella, Christmas At The Women’s Hotel: A Biedermeier Story, is being published by Harper Via in October 2025 and available for preorder now.

It’s set in what I have taken to calling 1964a, a sort of perpetual, hazy, late-early or early-mid era of the 1960s that will never turn into the late 1960s¹ (Here I am guided by the perpetual 1813 of Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander novels. If you take out all the naval bits, and make almost all the characters women in 1960s Manhattan, then Women’s Hotel is not unlike the Aubrey-Maturin series!) and features most of the cast of Women’s Hotel, except for those who got married or packed off to other institutions at the end of the first book.

If you couldn’t get enough references to Swedish bestselling novels in the 1920s, descriptions of unsuccessful afternoons at home, satisfying lunches for one, or first dates that don’t quite come off but nevertheless betoken the prospect of a consequential new friendship, then Christmas At The Women’s Hotel is the book(let) for you:

“Katherine had deliberately convinced herself the night before that she felt a cold coming on, one that would require urgent cosseting, and dedicated the whole of that Sunday morning to making herself queenly comfortable in bed. This meant wearing her warmest bed-jacket with scalloped sleeves, drinking strong coffee out of a squat old china caudle-cup, an orange, arranging a slice of each of ham and coffee-cake on a tray, and reading the second volume of Kristin Lavransdatter.

A Sunday spent in bed had to be managed with a firm hand. Well-planned and properly arranged, it could be restorative and wholesome, gladdening the spirit and brightening the complexion. But an impromptu Sunday in bed, wearing haphazard and mismatched bedclothes, with hair unwashed and crumbs in the pillowcase, with the crossword spoiled and no plans settled for the evening, was little better than a torment.

Katherine always arranged her creaturely comforts with a surer hand in the winter. In spring and summer, as the hours of daylight increased, she declined in both confidence and poise. There was so much clock-time left in each summer afternoon that it exceeded her best judgement well before sunset. She dithered, she hesitated, she wavered; she would invariably order the wrong thing at lunch, began reading books she knew she would never finish, picked quarrels with Lucianne, avoided Arthur, her sponsor in A.A. and crept out of meetings early; she made ill-judged purchases and threw away necessary, even beautiful things in fits of misguided certainty that she no longer needed them. But from September on, coolness and common sense prevailed in her well-ordered mind, and she knew where she was at. To be sure, the prospect of another Christmas alone at the Biedermeier kept her slightly on edge, but on the whole, winter was Katherine’s season.”

Appreciative readers will detect notes of Marjorie Hillis, Barbara Pym, Angela Thirkell, Armistead Maupin, Maud Hart Lovelace, and O. Douglas. I care very much about mild domestic fiction in all its forms, and am guided through this series by Zechariah 4:10: “Do not despise the day of small things, for they shall rejoice, and shall see the plumb in the hand of Zerubbabel with those seven; they are the eyes of the Lord, which run to and fro to the whole earth.”² That’s not to say that the lives of these characters don’t move forward, or that plot is entirely incidental to the project of recreating vanished domestic routines, but you had better believe those domestic routines are getting the fullest shrift imaginable. I’m very pleased with how the book has turned out and hope you like it too!

I’ll be sure to announce any in-person readings or tour dates here once we’ve gotten them on the schedule. And if you’d like to invite me to speak at your college/bookstore/book club/book festival, why don’t you drop me a line?³ What on earth is stopping you?

1. Lucianne is Stephen Maturin, Mrs Mossler is Captain Jack Aubrey, and Katherine is a slightly less crabby Killick, I think, although the Mrs. Mossler/Aubrey connection is an imperfect one.

2. I am less guided by the plumb of Zerubbabel than I am the reminder to pay respectful attention to small things.

3. Dannymlavery at gmail!