One of my weird, bookish thrills is finding new genre-lets that delight me. My most recent discovery is that I love reading books about buildings full of people: hotels, apartment buildings, boarding schools. Something about buildings where strangers live in close proximity and their stories weave together fascinates me, especially when there’s a mystery involved. I suspect my joy in this kind of story springs from my love of serendipity and coincidence, and how such events can often make it seem like fate is taking a hand in peoples’ lives.
Here are some of my favorites in this sub-genre:
Grand Hotel, by Vicki Baum
This is the first novel I can recall of this type. It tells the stories of several guests in a Berlin hotel who bump into each other and then carom off into their own adventures or tragedies. It’s like getting several novels all for the price of one.
The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn, by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky
This bizarre mystery takes place in a remote hotel. Detective Glebsky was just looking for a place to take a holiday, but lands smack in the middle of a lot of weirdness.
The Master Key, by Masako Togawa
This strange novel is one of the best mysteries I’ve read lately. It all takes place in the K Apartments for Ladies, where several different crimes and conspiracies get all tangled up in one another.
If any of you out there have any ideas about similar books, please let me know in the comments.
I’ve never thought about this being a sub-genre, but I also like the idea of a bunch of strangers living or being in the same building and having their own separate lives. I do tend to enjoy fantasy books that center on boarding schools, though. I’ll need to read these suggestions, especially The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn. That sounds great!
I’m not sure at what point a trop or a plot becomes its own genre. I’ll have to think about that.
Ooh, try Christadora by Tim Murphy (apartment building in NYC) or These Dividing Walls by Fran Cooper (same concept, Paris).
Thank you!
I also enjoyed The Master Key so much! A book that comes to mind is The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery – a French novel taking place at an apartment building with quirky and interesting characters but absolutely heartbreaking.
I forgot about The Elegance of the Hedgehog! I’ll have to update my post!
What did you think of it? I really loved it but I know some people were conflicted about it.
This is so funny because I’ve thought about writing a blog post about apartment building books! It never occurred to me to connect that to my love of boarding school stories though. I highly recommend the verbosely titled “Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio” by Amara Lakhous. There’s also “Building Stories”, a boxed set of comics which revolves around an apartment building in Chicago.
I have not read it, but the first novel set in a whole building that came to mind was the Egyptian novel The Yacoubian novel.
I was also thinking about universities and boarding schools novels (a favorite of mine). I have been a long fan of the latter ever since I read Little Princess when I was a kid. I would then recommend Picnic at Hanging Rock which is weird and very good. Less good but fitting to this particular subgenre would be Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro; Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld; The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark; I am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe…