Characters drift in and out of one another’s lives: a Jewish scholar, a doctor, a woman slipping toward breakdown, all held within a structure that feels deliberately unstable.

The “hotel” is all for the temporary, the dislocated, those to be governed by forces that are only partly visible. His first novel and written out of Thomas’s own experiences as a refugee, the book carries that tension between intellectual abstraction and bodily threat.

It’s dense without being showy, and occasionally disorienting in ways that feel intentional rather than ornamental. You can see why it attracts strong admirers—there’s a real severity to it—but it doesn’t exactly offer an easy way in.

Picador (Indigo imprint) paperback, 1996 (first Indigo edition; originally published 1981). Noticeable creasing, edgewear, and handling wear to covers; spine worn; pages toned but clean and readable.