Women's Hotel Is Available For Pre-Order Now

"Lunch had become a slightly unfashionable meal at the Biedermeier."

Please enjoy the cover of my next book (and first novel), Women’s Hotel, out 10/15. I’m so pleased with it — I’d had the cover for Leo Hartas’ This Old House in mind, as well as the first edition of The Westing Game and the Dean Street Press reissue of Babbacombe’s — and it’s precisely the kind of cover that would pull me up short from browsing myself.

You can preorder Women’s Hotel from Barnes & Noble today through Friday the 19th for 25% off, if you like, as well as the usual run of online retailers, or your local bookstore or library.

I’m more excited than I can say. Women’s Hotel has been very much influenced by midcentury women writers I’ve discovered through the Furrowed Middlebrow and Greyladies, two of my favorite publishers: Ruby Ferguson, O. Douglas, D.E. Stevenson, Susan Scarlett, and Rachel Ferguson (no relation). I wanted to write a good book about small events in the lives of interesting but unremarkable people; I was more than once taken aback by what a difficult undertaking that is.

Women’s Hotel follows a group of women living in the fictional Biedermeier Hotel (a down-at-heel sister to the Barbizon) in the mid-1960s, particularly its director, Mrs. Mossler, the first-floor manager Katherine Heap, workshy society girl Lucianne Caruso, typesetter Pauline Carter, and daytime elevator operator Stephen, among others. It’s a book that’s very much concerned with what people eat for dinner, and how they decide on it, with the comfort of their clothes, whether or not they buy a hat, the failure rate of their haircuts, and the superficial daily activities they perform in common — how they get in one another’s way, how they give one another space, how they try to impose upon others without being imposed upon in return.

I’m including a very brief excerpt from the beginning of the book, in case you’re still on the fence:

Chapter One: The End of Breakfast

“It was the end of the continental breakfast, and therefore the beginning of the end of everything else. For thirty-five years, every Biedermeier girl whose rent for the coming week had found its way to Mrs. Mossler’s crocheted lantern-bag could go to sleep secure in the knowledge that she would wake up with a breakfast tray slid into the recess of her door, delivered just as advertised, “silently and gratuitously, no waiting — no waiter!” During the war the fourteen-dollar rent was raised to eighteen dollars, then again to twenty-five[…] But the Biedermeier’s daily rendezvous between tray and door never failed, not even on Sundays, and aside from a wartime substitution of Postum for coffee, the menu had remained implacably untouched by time. One’s choice of either sliced grapefruit or tomato, a Vienna roll or brown buttered toast, a shirred egg, and a cluster of grapes sustained plenty until dinner (new girls learned quickly not to speak of supper within the walls), as lunch was not included in the weekly rate, and fewer than half the inmates were so reliably employed as to be able to comfortably commission a week’s worth in advance.”

Receive 25% OFF my first novel, WOMEN’S HOTEL, if you preorder from Barnes and Noble today through 4/19. from 4/17-4/19! Use the code PREORDER25 to get 25% off.

Women’s Hotel is also available for preorder through Bookshop, Target, Hicklebee’s, Amazon, and Boswell’s.

I do hope very much that you’ll read it, if you get the chance. Thank you!