Hotel du Lac is a novel about a mildly famous writer, Edith Hope, who has a mildly infamous scandal that sends her packing to a remote hotel during the off-season, far away from her friends and family. What the scandal is, we find out relatively late in the narrative; how famous the writer is, we learn also relatively late. Neither is particularly fascinating!

The story feels about as exciting as time at an off-season hotel on a remote lake might be imagined to feel, which is to say - rather dull. There are a handful of characters, and they are not particularly exciting or memorable. There’s a marriage proposal which feels about as surprising as gravity. Even the infamous scandal is kind of dull when we finally learn about it, almost predictably so. On the whole, this narrative feels like a fairly pale echo of The Awakening. It was never really clear to me how it wound up winning a Booker Prize, but maybe I missed something!