A beer cellar, a luxury hotel and a grandmother who dies twice over…
Resplendent with glamour but overcast by many a shadow, the story of the Salz family centres on Leipzig’s up-market Fürstenhof hotel. Salz Sr. buys it in 1914, but his actress daughter Lola refuses to set foot in it for many years-not during the Second World War, nor later when the hotel has become GDR state property and Lola is living in Munich with her frail daughter Aveline. It is not until 1989, after her son Kurt has restored the Fürstenhof to family ownership, that Lola steps in to preside not only over the hotel but also the fortunes of a family worn down by the relentless winds of change and their desperate strivings to establish a life beyond the confines of the hotel.
This is an intensely absorbing novel full of surprising twists about a highly unconventional family, in which the shadows from one generation reach on into the next -despite their endeavours to lend their lives a completely fresh perspective.