Estoril

Author/Guide: Dejan Tiago-Stankovic

Why a Booktrail?

1945: In one hotel in Lisbon, the world is happening…

ISBN: 978-1786698155
Translator: Christina Pribichevich-Zoric
Genre: Fiction, Historical

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What you need to know before your trail

In a luxurious grand hotel just outside Lisbon, at the height of the Second World War, Estoril is a story about exile, divided loyalties, fear and survival. The hotel’s guests include spies, fallen kings, refugees from the Balkans, Nazis, American diplomats and stateless Jews. The Portuguese secret police broodingly observe the visitors, terrified that their country’s neutrality will be compromised.

The hotel guests are a mixed bunch of both fact and fiction – historical figures like the ex-King Carol of Romania, the great Polish pianist Jan Paderewski, the British agent Ian Fleming, the Russian chess grandmaster Alexander Alekhine and the French writer and flyer Antoine de St Exupery, who forms a poignant friendship with a young Jewish boy living alone in the hotel.

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Hotel Estoril

A very real and luxury hotel today that you can stay in and read this novel to get the most amazing literary feeling!

Portugal at the time of the novel is supposed to be neutral but inside the corridors of this hotel, the world is as fluid and as chaotic as it is outside.

There’s the huge number of refugees, so many people left without a home, or even a state. The Baltic countries are splintering into many different and new states and Jews from across the world are feeling threatened and live in constant fear.

The hotel is a microcosm of what’s going on in the outside world – the historical figures who are staying here

But it’s also a veritable nest of spies as spies from across the globe are here to watch over the comings and goings of not just this hotel but the entire world taking place within. They also want to ensure that the foreigners here don’t spread their ideas of freedom and democracy to the others. This is a hotel in exile and the people in it are in ideological cases which, if opened, would prove disastrous.

This hotel represents the era of war, chaos, political shifts, and a time alliances are made and changed for ever.