The Third Hotel

Praise

“The most transforming kind of fiction is capable of causing a dislocation of reality: a bit of the bizarre, a lot kept beneath the surface and worlds can open within worlds. There’s Borges and Bolaño, Kafka and Cortázar, Modiano and Murakami, and now Laura van den Berg. The acclaimed author of two story collections and a novel, van den Berg has always been good, but with “The Third Hotel” she’s become fantastic — in every sense of the word…nothing unoriginal slips by in this flawless novel.” ― Randy Rosenthal, THE WASHINGTON POST

“Always vivid . . . There’s no denying [van den Berg’s] skill at rendering this material; her sentences, at their best, are extraordinarily lucid, lodging places and people indelibly in memory . . . Read [The Third Hotel] as the inscrutable future cult classic it probably is, and let yourself be carried along by its twisting, unsettling currents.” ― J. Robert Lennon, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

“The Third Hotel contains all of the ingredients for a classic work of horror . . . Not every author can make a character both fly through supernatural events and remain grounded in a place the way van den Berg does with Clare. The strength of van den Berg’s storytelling comes from Clare’s attempts to solve the mystery of why Richard has hunkered down in a different country, layered with grief from back home that continues to haunt her. She’s a “final girl” whose denouement horrifies in a modern, bloodless way.” ― Bethanne Patrick, TIME

“This is no Hitchcockian tale of a double life but an insightful portrait of grief’s power to create ‘a dislocation of reality’… memorably [captures] the ‘thundering mystery’ of marriage and heartbreak.” ― THE NEW YORKER

“Laura van den Berg’s The Third Hotel is sublime and unsettling, haunting and sophisticated. The Havana that serves as the backdrop for this story is as surreal, soaked in perspiration, and capitulated to ruin as the sense of loss that drives the novel. This is one not to be missed. A mesmerizing masterwork.” — David Gonzalez, SKYLIGHT BOOKS, August Indie Next Citation 

“Laura van den Berg is an artist of the uncanny. As with some surrealist painting, devour her work quickly and the trick will not snag . . . Clare’s eerie perceptional wobbles are conjured beautifully by van den Berg, who sees like a painter and narrates like a crime reporter. To read The Third Hotel sometimes feels like following a character based on Joan Didion sinking deeper into a universe whose laws were written by Patricia Highsmith . . . We are anchored by loss, set free by love, clichés tell us. What, this exquisitely written book asks, if it’s the opposite? In doing so van den Berg drives home an inversion far scarier than any zombie film.” ― John Freeman, THE BOSTON GLOBE

“Strange, unsettling, and profound from start to finish, The Third Hotel is a book teeming with the kind of chaos that can only emanate from the mind. It could be fairly described as a meditation on grief, or marriage, or travel; fresh insights on each materialize regularly, at enviable levels of nuance…She gets under your skin and hits bone.” — David Canfield, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

“Van Den Berg doesn’t do neatness. She does elegance. She writes with off-kilter beauty and absolute relaxation; the less peaceful a sentence should be, the more peaceful it is . . . The Third Hotel is a novel that operates in symbols and layers, which means you can read it however you like. There’s no one ending, no right answer, and as a result, it will take away your internal compass. It will unmoor you, send you wobbling around your house in a haze. It will slide some eels under your skin. My recommendation? Let it. We can all stand to learn some new truths.” ― Lily Meyer, NPR.ORG

“It’s a quicksilver novel ― just when you think you have a possible grip on its plot and meaning, it slithers out of grasp. The Third Hotel works its magic at the level of the subconscious, where nightmares are made.” ―Jenny Shank, DALLAS MORNING NEWS

“Reading Laura van den Berg’s disquieting new novel, The Third Hotel, is akin to walking out of a dark movie theater into bright sunlight. Part of you is still living in a cinematic dreamscape. The real world is what’s imaginary . . . the writing is lovely and fluid. She is comfortable with ambiguity, and The Third Hotel isn’t intent on resolution. It reminds me of another hotel, that one in California, where “you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.” Haunting.” ―Nancy Pate, MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE

“This is a gorgeous and layered novel that will haunt you for days after you’ve finished.” — Samantha Irby, MARIE CLAIRE

“Eerily gorgeous…once finished, [the novel] seems to continue beyond the last page, like a dream that stays with you long after waking.” ― Natalie Beach, O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE

“A twisty exploration of grief and perception as well as the ways in which we contribute to our own undoing.” ― Julia Pierpont, OPRAHMAGAZINE.COM

“Enter The Third Hotel like a portal, and surrender to a surreal, vivid, impossible yet clearly realistic adventure . . . Van Den Berg uses cinematic language, imagery and structure in this impressionistic portrait of a marriage that has come undone, a woman whose reality is skewed and a sea swept island filled with seductive art, strange vistas and unexpected danger.” ― Jane Ciabattari, BBC CULTURE

“Eerie and uncanny, layered and sharp . . . Though subtly drawn, what it means to be a woman becomes just as central to The Third Hotel as the mystery of Richard’s reappearance. Powerful and atmospheric, van den Berg’s novel portrays a haunting descent into grief and the mysteries we can’t quite solve while advancing a thought-provoking exploration of marriage, misogyny, and the loneliness that lurks within unwavering privacy.” ―Lauren Sarazen, LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS

“At its heart, The Third Hotel is a novel about precarity — the fragile nature of memory, sanity, and how the reality we perceive constantly changes. Clare’s unease in Havana bears striking resemblance to the political state of our world now, where reality changes almost daily, twisting to fit new logic, new thought, new flesh. Financially, politically, socially, environmentally — we live in precarious times, walking along the edge of a knife.” ― Matt E. Lewis, LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS

“In her magnificent collection of essays, Sidewalks, Valeria Luiselli utilizes relingos, vacant or empty spaces, as a way to give meaning to gaps or erasures in text, in architecture, and in the self. Laura van den Berg’s beautiful and unsettling new novel, The Third Hotel, picks up a similar strand, constructing a narrative of memory, geography, loss, and emptiness. Van den Berg’s novel is a palimpsest of B-grade Latin American horror films, the psychology of grief, and the very idea of narrative as a meaning-making enterprise.” ― Christian Kiefer, PARIS REVIEW DAILY

“An unsettling and elegant horror story set in Cuba, ‘The Third Hotel’ cements van den Berg’s place as one of our finest contemporary writers.” ― Point Reyes Books, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE 

“Laura van den Berg’s brilliant new novel, The Third Hotel, is a quasi-supernatural tale of loss and grief, told with an exquisite flair for language . . . The Third Hotel is van den Berg’s second novel and fourth book of fiction, and with it, she has firmly established herself as one of this country’s premier stylists. A dreamy otherworldliness haunts these pages, and will, I wager, haunt you, as it did me, long after you finish this slim and masterful mood piece. I dare you to make it to the final, piercing line―which I won’t spoil here―and not feel as if the world you live in has been irrevocably changed.” ―Nick White, CHICAGO REVIEW OF BOOKS

“Equal parts suspenseful and dreamlike, The Third Hotel is a vivid and captivating novel about how well we can actually know anyone.” ― Michele Filgate, VIRTUOSO MAGAZINE

“The Third Hotel amounts to more than thrills and chills. Van den Berg has swapped out the stages of grief for an alternative recovery process, one that refreshes old notions of female power and identity . . . This story, adapting horror tropes to new ends, releases “the widow thrashing within.” By catching and seducing her zombie―and then finally letting him go―Clare’s stages of grief deliver her not to Zen-like acceptance, but to a place of potent new monsters.”― John Domini, THE SEWANEE REVIEW

“The Third Hotel will play tricks on you―and that’s the point . . . he Third Hotel is a meditation on the thin fault line between imagination and reality, on grief, and on marriage. It’s Twin Peaks meets literary fiction.” ―Elena Nicolaou, REFINERY29

“Gorgeously eerie . . . Dense and uncompromisingly intelligent, The Third Hotel is uninterested in leading the reader to a simple answer. Buoyed by van den Berg’s sinuous, marvelous sentences, the novel is instead a deep dive into memory, love, and loss as filtered through film theory, metaphysics, and the humid, sunstroked cityscape of Havana. A lesser writer might have lost themself in this byzantine world of maybe-doppelgangers and maybe-zombies and maybe-madness, but Laura van den Berg is one of our most accomplished storytellers―it is no surprise that she has elevated the uncannily horrifying into something achingly human . . . The Third Hotel is a kind of dream, one that should be repeated. Finish the book, ponder the dream, then read it―dream it―again.” ―Chase Burke, PLOUGHSHARES

“At my house, there is a shelf of New York Review Books Classics. Many of these books have a special quality that seems outside of time, and when this happens, it takes the reader a few hours to reorient himself in the ordinary world. That’s the way I felt finishing The Third Hotel, too, and it made me wonder how it’s possible that a writer who can do this can also be a person of my generation, breathing the same air, drinking the same water. When I was younger, I used to believe that literature was some kind of miracle, and for a couple of hours, reading Laura’s novel, I briefly believed again.” ― Kyle Minor, TIN HOUSE

“I love Laura van den Berg for her eeriness and her elegance, the way the fabric of her stories is woven on a slightly warped loom so that you read her work always a bit perturbed. The Third Hotel is artfully fractured, slim and singular; it’s a book that sings, but always with a strange pressure more felt than heard beneath the song.” ― Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies

I love the way Laura van den Berg writes. THE THIRD HOTEL is another of her beguiling little masterpieces. One that, with ruminative grace and sublime wit, answers and elucidates the question of what it means to be human. ―Miriam Toews, author of All My Puny Sorrows

“The Third Hotel is a fever dream of a book, strange and beautiful. Each page is a showcase for Laura van den Berg’s forensic intellect and her startling, mesmerizing prose.” ― Katie Kitamura, author of A Separation

“In this gorgeous, frighteningly smart novel, a woman deranged by grief becomes an imposter in her own life. As inventive and inexorable as a dream, The Third Hotel is a devastating excavation of the unconscionable demands we place on those we love, and a profound portrait of the uncanny composite creature that is a marriage. Laura van den Berg is one of our best writers, an absolute marvel.” ― Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You

“Laced through with sharp insights―not just on marriage and grief, but also on the pull of travel and the dynamics of horror movies―the layers of [The Third Hotel] fit together so seamlessly they’re almost Escher-esque. The line between the real and the imagined is forever blurry, and the result of all that ambiguity is both moving and unsettling. Gorgeously haunting and wholly original; a novel that rewards patience.” ―KIRKUS

“Mysterious and engrossing . . . Toying with horror tropes and conventions, and displaying shades of authors such as Julio Cortázar, van den Berg turns Clare’s journey into a dreamlike exploration of grief. This is a potent novel about life, death, and the afterlife.” ― PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY

“Brooding, often-surreal, funerally bemusing . . . van den Berg’s entrancing, gorgeously enigmatic tale dramatizes the narcosis of grief.” ―Donna Seaman, BOOKLIST

“Some books, rare ones, offer a hallucinatory experience, and Laura van den Berg’s stunning The Third Hotel fits squarely into that category…Playful, puzzling, and evocative, The Third Hotel wraps the reader in the swirling eddy of Clare’s grief and deposits them downstream, as perplexed and transformed as its heroine. We’ve never read a better evocation of the mind-altering experience of loss.” ― Powell’s Books, Indiespensable #75

“otherworldly and unputdownable” ― Caroline Rogers, SOUTHERN LIVING

“A woman goes to a Cuban horror-film festival and lives out her own ghost story in this haunting novel. Recently widowed, Claire believes she sees her husband standing right there in the middle of Havana. The dreamlike state in which she pursues him and the past memories she recalls and relives are a stunning portrait of a marriage and what remains furiously alive even after death.” ― Maris Kreizman, VULTURE

“I am not the type of person that misses my subway stop. I pre-walk, I know when my train comes, and I get to the office at the same time every day. But this week I’ve missed my stop twice and once I had pry open the closing doors because I have been completely, utterly absorbed in Laura van den Berg’s forthcoming The Third Hotel. A surreal novel about a woman who follows her dead husband to Cuba, it’s the type of story that sits so comfortably in the uncanny that whenever I looked up from the page I am sure the world had changed in some way.” ― Emily Firetog, LITHUB

“The Third Hotel explores the oddities of travel and relationships; silence and noise; and the effects of past trauma. Like Clare, it is an engrossing, thought-provoking enigma.” ― Julie Kastner, SHELF AWARENESS

“As she showed in both her short story collection, The Isle of Youth, and her first novel, Find Me, Laura van den Berg is an expert at creating surreal worlds that are just one slight twist away from our own, but are all the more infused with mystery because of their relative closeness. In The Third Hotel, the mystery involves the fact that after Clare, a widow, arrives for a book festival in Cuba, she spots her husband, Richard, who is, of course, supposed to be dead. From there, Clare follows Richard throughout the streets of Havana, reliving her childhood, marriage, and her role in Richard’s death, all building up to an unsettling peak, in which all notions of reality and fantasy become fully blurred.” ― Kristin Iversen, NYLON

“Like an award-winning documentarian, the author leads readers through a vaguely supernatural, possibly metaphysical, dreamscape in Havana, Cuba, in this enthralling story of grief.” ― Cory Oldweiler, amNEWYORK

“The Third Hotel is both a meditation on sorrow and longing―for answers, insight, closure―and a haunted and haunting quest narrative whose slimness belies an ocean of eerie power . . . An utterly transfixing, dreamlike descent into the depths of a psyche stricken by grief and confusion, The Third Hotel is miniature marvel and the most unsettling book you’ll read all year.” ―Dan Sheehan, LITHUB

“I just finished Laura van den Berg’s The Third Hotel and I adored it; it’s always such an experience reading her fiction for the way it mysteriously plunges, for the ways she blurs the borders between reality and genre, and I think she’s really gone somewhere refreshingly new in The Third Hotel: a little more philosophical, a little more rigorous in its inquiry, yet somehow more urgent.” — Shuchi Saraswat, BROOKLINE BOOKSMITH

“Laura van den Berg’s new novel THE THIRD HOTEL begins with a woman attending a film festival in Havana, a trip she’d intended to take with her husband, the horror film aficionado, before he was killed.  Or was he?  It isn’t long before Clare begins seeing Richard everywhere and then is plunged into a journey both past and present.  Gorgeously written, THE THIRD HOTEL is an emotional stab in the heart.” ― Mary Cotton, NEWTONVILLE BOOKS

“What I think sets The Third Hotel apart…is how seamlessly it integrates form and content. van den Berg uses the nightmarish logic of the horror genre and the critical insights of film theory—especially in the feminist mode—to weave a narrative that is continually interrogating and re-shaping itself, daring us to uncover what is lurking beneath the people we purport to know, the things we say, and how we view ourselves…Van den Berg repeatedly calls attention to these covert spaces, dares us to lift the rock and see what squirms underneath.” ― Douglas Koziol, ENTROPY MAGAZINE

“…the plot builds with a growing sense of unease. You’ll hit a point where you just can’t put it down.” ― Emily Burack, ALMA

“A reality-blurring rumination on the power of grief and alienation . . . Lush in description and psychology alike, The Third Hotel is a literary horror novel that will haunt you long past its final page.” ―Emily Nordling, TOR

“Dazzling . . . Van Den Berg gives loveliness to the gruesome while opening up the novel’s world to all kinds of ghosts. The real emotional power of the novel, however, beyond the elegance of its language and the precision and momentum of its telling, builds from what ends up being a brutal moment of confrontation. The scene brought tears to my eyes when I read it.” ― Chaya Bhuvansewar, MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW

“A literary novel for cinephiles, The Third Hotel revolves around film and a film festival, its characters super-fans and its imagination straight out of the cinema. Laura van den Berg’s prose style, which takes after David Lynch and Alfred Hitchcock, stand out in a genre where the signifiers are more often Faulkner and Kerouac… The Third Hotel luxuriates in the fertile narrative ground of the uncanny, the phantasmagoric and the depths of grief.” – Ryne Clos, SPECTRUM CULTURE

“After finishing THE THIRD HOTEL I found myself reeling for days. What a triumph of a book! Such a gorgeous, intelligent excavation of marriage, loss, art, flânerie. Simply spending time inside Laura van den Berg’s elegant, muscular sentences has made me a better writer.” ― Kristen Iskandrian, author of Motherest

“I’ve always been a huge fan of van den Berg’s work, but this novel took my breath away. The Third Hotel is a ghost story for grown ups—when the search for clarity becomes obscure and reality is increasingly blurred. There is so much confidence and daring in her writing, but at the same time her slanted view of the world holds a kind of humility and clarity that makes it all feel so achingly human. Elegant, twisted, and propulsive, I loved it.” — Claire Cameron, author of The Last Neanderthal

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Interviews & Profiles: A Rearranging World: NPR Weekend Edition; WBUR Radio Boston; The Atlantic Interview; BOMB Magazine Interview; Harvard Magazine Profile; Paris Review Daily Interview; Wandering Through the Uncanny Valley of Laura van den Berg’s Fictions: LitHub Profile; Powell’s Books Interview; To Thicken and Complicate Through Linear Time: Tin House Interview; Electric Literature Interview; Harvard Gazette Profile; Florida Literature, Liminal Spaces, & Absent Places: Vol. 1 Brooklyn; The Horror Films That Inspired The Third Hotel: LitHub; A Dislocation of Reality: FSG Work-in-Progress; TK Podcast; Playlist for Largehearted Boy; Fractured Lives: Brooklyn Book Festival Panel; Politics & Prose Interview; Harvard Bookstore Interview; Portland Public Library Interview; OtherPeople Podcast; Fields Magazine Issue 10; Palm Beach Post profile; Full Stop Interview.

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Harper’s Baazar August’s Best New Books; BBC 10 Books to Read in August; Elle Magazine 30 Best Books to Read This Summer; Conde Nast Traveler What Our Favorite Authors are Reading Right Now; Southern Living Best Summer Reads; Oprah.com Poolside Reads; Toronto Star 5 Books for the End of Summer; Nylon 46 Great Books to Read This Summer; Washington Post What Your Favorite Authors Are Reading This Summer; InStyle 11 Books for Summer; Ritz-Carlton Fall Reading; Vulture 18 Books We Can’t Wait to Read This Summer; LitHub 15 Books You Should Read This August; Bustle New Books You Need to Know This Week; Refinery29 Best Books of August; Boston.com 22 Books to Read This Summer; Buzzfeed 33 Most Exciting New Books of 2018; Paris Review Daily Staff Picks; Mashable Guide to Summer Reading; The Millions Most Anticipated: The Great Second-Half 2018 Book Preview; Library Journal Barbara’s Picks; Huffington Post 60 Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2018; Hello Giggles 19 Books for 2018; The Strand Buyer’s Preview; The Rumpus What to Read in 2018 & What to Read When You’ve Made it Halfway Through 2018;  Tor 20 Summer Books We Can’t Wait to Read; Paperback Paris The Best 18 New Books for Summer; Alma Favorite Books for Summer; AMNewYork Summer Reading Preview; Book Riot 10 August New Releases; Palm Beach Post Seventeen Sizzling Reads