"Always bright . . . There'southward 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 archetype it probably is, and let yourself be carried along past its twisting, unsettling currents." —J. Robert Lennon, The New York Times Book Review
"There's Borges and Bolaño, Kafka and Cortázar, Modiano and Murakami, and at present Laura van den Berg. The acclaimed writer of two story collections and a novel, van den Berg has always been proficient, but with The Third Hotel she's become fantastic — in every sense of the give-and-take . . . The fantastic plot is elevated by van den Berg's fantastic writing and unique twists of language . . . ." —Randy Rosenthal, The Washington Post "This is no Hitchcockian tale of a double life but an insightful portrait of grief's power to create 'a dislocation of reality.' Mischievous details and winningly bizarre characters . . . assist the book avoid melodrama and memorably capture the 'thundering mystery' of spousal relationship and heartbreak." — The New Yorker
"Strange, unsettling, and profound from first to finish, The Tertiary Hotel is a book teeming with the kind of chaos that tin only emanate from the mind. It could exist adequately described as a meditation on grief, or marriage, or travel; fresh insights on each materialize regularly, at enviable levels of dash . . . [van den Berg] gets under your peel and hits bone." —David Canfield, Amusement Weekly
"Laura van den Berg is an artist of the uncanny. As with some surrealist painting, devour her piece of work rapidly and the play a trick on will non snag . . . Clare's eerie perceptional wobbles are conjured beautifully past van den Berg, who sees like a painter and narrates like a law-breaking reporter. To read The Tertiary Hotel sometimes feels like following a character based on Joan Didion sinking deeper into a universe whose laws were written by Patricia Highsmith." —John Freeman, The Boston Earth
"The Third Hotel contains all of the ingredients for a archetype work of horror . . . Not every writer tin make a character both fly through supernatural events and remain grounded in a identify the way van den Berg does with Clare. The strength of van den Berg'south storytelling comes from Clare's attempts to solve the mystery of why Richard has hunkered down in a dissimilar country, layered with grief from dorsum home that continues to haunt her. She'due south a "final girl" whose denouement horrifies in a modern, bloodless mode." —Bethanne Patrick, Time
"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 exist, the more peaceful it is . . . The 3rd Hotel is a novel that operates in symbols and layers, which means yous can read information technology however yous like."—Lily Meyer, NPR.org
"Wonderful, lucid, mysterious." —James Wood, Conde Nast Traveler
"Beautiful and unsettling . . . Julio Cortázar could see himself walking the partially erased and re-inscribed streets of van den Berg'due south imagination, but in the end those streets are, without a doubt, van den Berg's ain." —Christian Kiefer, The Paris Review (Staff Selection)
"The Third Hotel sets a creepy, unsettling mood . . . . Steeped in magical realism, The Third Hotel is a dreamy and lushly rendered written report of bereavement, the loneliness of travel, and the intricacies of a union. This is a gorgeous and layered novel that volition haunt yous for days after y'all've finished." —Samantha Irby, Marie Claire
"Eerie and uncanny, layered and abrupt . . . Though subtly drawn, what it means to exist a adult female becomes just as cardinal to The Third Hotel as the mystery of Richard'south reappearance. Powerful and atmospheric, van den Berg'due south novel portrays a haunting descent into grief and the mysteries we can't quite solve while advancing a idea-provoking exploration of marriage, misogyny, and the loneliness that lurks inside unwavering privacy." —Lauren Sarazen, Los Angeles Review of Books
"A twisty exploration of grief and perception also every bit the ways in which we contribute to our own undoing." —Julia Pierpont, O, the Oprah Mag
"Reading Laura van den Berg's disquieting new novel, The Third Hotel, is alike to walking out of a night picture palace into vivid sunlight. Part of you is still living in a cinematic dreamscape. The real world is what'south imaginary . . . the writing is lovely and fluid. —Nancy Pate, Minneapolis Star Tribune
" In evocative, lucid prose, van den Berg conjures the psyche of a adult female unmoored, and examines how wedlock and solitude, travel and domesticity, and other forces create and stabilize our identities. The 3rd Hotel is dense with everything that makes a novel memorable: psychological complexity, sensory vividness, narrative tension and ideas about humanity and fine art." --Claire Fallon, Huffington Post
"The 3rd 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 past grief and confusion, The Third Hotel is miniature marvel and the most unsettling volume yous'll read all year." —Dan Sheehan, LitHub
"Laura van den Berg'due south brilliant new novel, The Third Hotel, is a quasi-supernatural tale of loss and grief, told with an exquisite flair for linguistic communication . . . The Third Hotel is van den Berg'due south second novel and quaternary volume 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 y'all, every bit it did me, long subsequently you finish this slim and masterful mood slice." —Nick White, Chicago Review of Books
"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, dearest, and loss as filtered through film theory, metaphysics, and the humid, sunstroked cityscape of Havana. A bottom writer might have lost themself in this byzantine globe of maybe-doppelgangers and possibly-zombies and mayhap-madness, just Laura van den Berg is i of our about achieved storytellers—it is no surprise that she has elevated the uncannily horrifying into something achingly human." —Chase Shush, Ploughshares
"It's a quicksilver novel — merely when you recollect 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, The Dallas Morning News
"The Third Hotel amounts to more than than thrills and chills. Van den Berg has swapped out the stages of grief for an alternative recovery process, 1 that refreshes sometime notions of female power and identity . . . This story, adapting horror tropes to new ends, releases "the widow thrashing within." Past communicable and seducing her zombie—and then finally letting him go—Clare's stages of grief deliver her non to Zen-like credence, but to a place of potent new monsters. " —John Dimini, The Sewanee Review
"Enter The 3rd Hotel like a portal, and surrender to a surreal, brilliant, incommunicable yet clearly realistic adventure . . . Van Den Berg uses cinematic linguistic communication, imagery and structure in this impressionistic portrait of a spousal relationship that has come undone, a adult female whose reality is skewed and a sea swept island filled with seductive fine art, strange vistas and unexpected danger." —Jane Ciabattari, BBC Civilisation
"The Tertiary Hotel will play tricks on you—and that'due south the point . . . T he 3rd Hotel is a meditation on the thin fault line betwixt imagination and reality, on grief, and on matrimony. It's Twin Peaks meets literary fiction." —Elena Nicolaou, Refinery29
"Van den Berg's clean, descriptive prose brings full images and sensory detail to life without cartoon attention to the writing. The shapeshifting city of Havana is a riveting character in itself, and contributes greatly to the atmosphere. The 3rd Hotel explores the oddities of travel and relationships; silence and dissonance; and the furnishings of past trauma. Like Clare, it is an engrossing, thought-provoking enigma." —Julia Kastner, Shelf Awareness
"A reality-blurring rumination on the ability of grief and alienation . . . Lush in clarification and psychology alike, The Third Hotel is a literary horror novel that will haunt y'all long past its terminal page." —Emily Nordling, tor.com
"Laura van den Berg'south new novel, The Third Hotel, covers a thematically sprawling range of subjects, from zombie films to the secret flaws of a spousal relationship to the procedure of grieving someone who may not be as expressionless every bit initially expected. The result is a haunting, ambiguous novel, cerebral and tactile in equal mensurate." —Vol. ane Brooklyn
"Laced through with abrupt insights—non just on marriage and grief, but also on the pull of travel and the dynamics of horror movies—the layers of [The 3rd Hotel] fit together so seamlessly they're almost Escher-esque. The line betwixt 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'south journey into a dreamlike exploration of grief. This is a potent novel about life, death, and the afterlife." —Publishers Weekly
"The Tertiary Hotel luxuriates in the fertile narrative ground of the uncanny, the phantasmagoric and the depths of grief. Van den Berg explores the contours of the well-nigh intimate homo relationships: between married couples and between parents and children. This is heavy stuff, only Van den Berg as well delights in her fluency with motion-picture show culture and Latin American modes of expression." —Ryne Clos, Spectrum Culture
"Heart-searching, often-surreal, funerally bemusing . . . van den Berg's entrancing, gorgeously enigmatic tale dramatizes the narcosis of grief." —Booklist
"I beloved Laura van den Berg for her eeriness and her elegance, the style 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 atypical; information technology'due south a book that sings, but e'er with a strange pressure level more felt than heard beneath the song." —Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies
"In this gorgeous, frighteningly smart novel, a woman deranged by grief becomes an imposter in her ain life. Equally inventive and inexorable as a dream, The Tertiary 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 spousal relationship. Laura van den Berg is one of our best writers, an absolute marvel." —Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You
"I love the way Laura van den Berg writes. The Tertiary 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, writer of All My Puny Sorrows
"I've always been a huge fan of Laura van den Berg'southward work, but this novel took my breath away. The 3rd Hotel is a ghost story for grownups—when the search for clarity becomes obscure and reality is increasingly blurred. In that location is so much confidence and daring in her writing, but at the same time her slanted view of the globe holds a kind of humility and clarity that makes it all feel so achingly homo. Elegant, twisted, and propulsive, I loved it." —Claire Cameron, author of The Final Neanderthal
"After finishing The Tertiary Hotel I found myself reeling for days. What a triumph of a book! Such a gorgeous, intelligent earthworks of matrimony, loss, art, flânerie. But spending time inside Laura van den Berg'south elegant, muscular sentences has made me a better author." —Kristen Iskandrian, author of Motherest
"Dazzling . . . Van Den Berg gives loveliness to the gruesome while opening up the novel'southward world to all kinds of ghosts. The existent 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 beingness a brutal moment of confrontation. The scene brought tears to my eyes when I read it." —Chaya Bhuvansewar, Michigan Quarterly Review
