Hotel New Hampshire

Quirky, bizarre, tragic, fiendishly funny, The Hotel New Hampshire is anything but a conventional family saga, through a family saga it certainly is. The Berry family are different.Love abounds- both healthy and incestuous. It is the overwhelming desire of the Berry father to run a hotel, which dubious success, in both a former girls school in New Hampshire, and in Vienna. It is the Berry children who grab the reader's attention, sympathies and love- all five of them: Frank (the eldest), Franny (the weirdest), John ( the narrator), Lily ( the writer) and Egg ( the youngest).When ,Irving or rather John writes 'Frank's queer, Franny's weird, Lily's small and Egg is Egg' the initiated reader can do no other than shout a deafening 'yes, Iknow what you mean!' From there on, the reader is held spellbound as the family Labrador, Sorrow,first stuffed then becomes the cruel victim of a plane crash; and as John and Franny realise their incestuous desires. Stunning readable, mercilessly involving, The Hotel New Hampshire is peopled with characters-and bears-that you'll never forget. 'Irving is the wisest, most anguished and funniest novelist of his generation and The Hotel New Hampshire is his best work' CHICAGO SUN-TIMES 'A hectic, gaudy saga with the verve of a Marx Brothers Movie' NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW