num_pages: 241
description: A Small Hotel is a beautifully told story of love loss and redemption. Set in contemporary New Orleans but working its way back in time the novel chronicles the relationship between Michael and Kelly Hays who have decided to separate after twenty years of marriage.The book begins on the day that Michael and Kelly are to finalize their divorce. Kelly is due in court but instead drives from her home in Pensacola Florida across the panhandle to New Orleans and checks into Room 303 at the Olivier House in the citys French Quarterthe hotel where she and Michael fell in love some twenty years earlier and where she now finds herself about to make a decision that will affect her Michael and their nineteen-year-old daughter Samantha. Butler masterfully weaves scenes of the present with memories from both the viewpoint of Michael and Kellyscenes that span some twenty years taking the reader back to critical moments in the couples relationship and showing two people deeply in love but also struggling with their own insecurities and inabilities to express this love.An intelligent deeply moving and remarkably written portrait of a relationship that reads as a cross between a romance novel and a literary page-turner A Small Hotel is a masterful story that will remind readers once again why Robert Olen Butler has been called the best living American writer
language: English
title: A Small Hotel
publisher: Grove Press