Hotel Florida

A highly original and beautifully written account of the intrepid - and sometimes crazy - journalists who risked everything to report on the Spanish Civil War. Amanda Vaill has produced a work that is by turns gripping and heartbreaking, and utterly compelling * Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana and A World on Fire *
Fascinating ... A valiant job of pulling together so many disparate stories into a fascinating contemporaneous narrative, of why people believed things when they did. Inevitably Hemingway has all the best lines ... Vaill does a good job of showing how this mixture of ambition and conviction drives her characters onwards ... A timely reminder that there is nothing more important than telling the truth * Daisy Goodwin, Sunday Times *
Vividly written and impeccably researched, Hotel Florida animates a fascinating cast of historical figures, speaking urgently to questions of truth and betrayal that are still compelling today. What a story! * Mary Dearborn, author of biographies of Norman Mailer, Peggy Guggenheim and a forthcoming life of Ernest Hemingway *
Vaill weaves through the artists' tangled lives as they capture this historic moment * Vogue *
It's a marvellous piece of historical writing, informed by the letters, diaries, fiction, photographs, and films of the time (much of it produced by Vaill's six protagonists), which captures the confusion, the desperation, and the heroism on display; this is history you can immerse yourself in, and knowing the war's wretched outcome lends a sense of tragic irony to events * Independent on Sunday *