The little hotel

the long version

'If you knew what happens in the hotel every day! Not a day passes but something happens.' With these words the shrewd young proprietress of a modest Swiss hotel opens her account of the remarkable day-to-day events in her establishment. Little escapes here eye, still less her ear; for she is a good listener, and 'people come to confide in you. They tell you things they would not tell their own parents and friends, not even their lawyers and doctors. The period is the late 1940s. Many of Mme Bonnard's patrons are on the run from some real or imagined horror: from the Russians, from the dreaded Labour Government, from a husband bent on murder, from loneliness or madness...'.--Goodreads