Hotel Lux

Shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards 2024: History Book of the Year

Hotel Lux is an unforgettable book, bringing to life not only its protagonists but an entire world, and offering a new glimpse of a vanished past. Sally Rooney

'If affection is the first ground of memory, the archive is its late flowering and Hotel Lux its conservatory, Casey's history a tender nurture of pasts we overlook, but which whisper to us all the same.' Irish Times

Hotel Lux follows Irish radical May O'Callaghan and her friends, three revolutionary families brought together by their vision for a communist future and their time spent in the Comintern's Moscow living quarters, the Hotel Lux.

Historian Maurice Casey reveals the connections and disconnections of a group of forgotten communist activists whose lives collided in 1920s Moscow: a brilliant Irish translator, a maverick author, the rebel daughters of an East London Jewish family, and a family of determined German anti-fascists.

The dramatic and interlocking histories of the O'Flahertys, Cohens, and Leonhards offer an intimate insight into the legacies of the Russian Revolution from its earliest idealism through to the brutal Stalinist purges and beyond. Hotel Lux uncovers a world of forgotten radicals who saw their hopes and dreams crash against reality yet retained their faith in a beautiful future for all.

Culminating in a queer love story that saw the daughters of the Cohens and Leonhards create an enduring partnership even as their parents' political visions crumbled, this is a multi-generational rebel odyssey and a history of international communism, one which looks as much to the future as it does to the past.