The White Octopus Hotel — Alexandra Bell

A gorgeous, elegiac love story across time about a contemporary young woman haunted by a past tragedy, a young musician traumatized by his time in the WWI trenches, and the magical hotel that brings them together and allows them both to heal.Eve Shaw is a woman haunted—not just by adorable rabbits and purple balloons that only she can see, but by grief and guilt over a past mistake she would do anything to undo.But how can the past be unmade? It seems impossible…until an old man who shares a name with her favorite composer unexpectedly gives her a small ceramic octopus with one black-tipped tentacle—an octopus identical to the tattoo that moves mysteriously across her skin—and begs her to come back to the hotel.Thus begins a journey of discovery that leads her to the White Octopus Hotel—a gorgeous Belle Epoch building high in the Swiss Alps, whose rooms, it is rumored, contain a numinous magic. A phone that can let you speak to the dead. A clock whose hands point not to hours and minutes, but to Champagne, Truth, and Revelations. A music box that plays the most beautiful music on the world.But most critical to Eve is the rumor of a writing tablet that will allow you to send a message back to your past self. Here, at last, is the chance to undo the mistake that destroyed her life…if she can find a way back to a hotel that was abruptly abandoned one November night in 1935 and has been a moldering ruin ever since.Yet Eve knows she has been to the White Octopus before. And, armed with a key to Room 27—a room which does not exist—Eve unlocks the first of the hotel’s many secrets and finds herself back in 1935, a few days before the infamous Last Party that left the hotel abandoned.And, as it happens, Eve has opened a door to more than just the past. For within the White Octopus lies love, healing and forgiveness—if she can forgive herself enough to seize hold of it.