Leaving Small’s Hotel

Small’s Hotel, on a little island off Long Island, is where Peter and his wife, Albertine, have spent most of their adult lives. Albertine runs the hotel while Peter works quietly on his memoirs, but the future of the hotel, and of every gift Peter dreams of giving Albertine, is in jeopardy. What Peter does to save the hotel, his marriage, and possibly his life involves storytelling, friendship, memory, ghostwriting, real-estate, electrical contraptions, and great, abiding love. ＂Kraft’s imagination, like [Peter] Leroy’s, is endlessly fertile, not merely in its creations but in its connections, as well, so that each apparently innocent anecdote chimes with Kraft’s broader theme of the imagined life, of its thrilling, enhancing, and ultimately dangerous connection to the real.＂ Claire Messud, Newsday ＂A wonderful matryoshka of a novel . . . with just the sort of spectacular intricacy that makes a business fail and a novel fly.＂ The New Yorker