The Winter Guests

They came to buy the view. The house asked them to stay.

Two years after its miraculous reopening, the Palácio da Maré stands full, lit, and beloved on its Portuguese headland - until a letter arrives on paper so heavy it stands up by itself.

The Meridian Collection - eleven flags, forty thousand keys - holds an option on the pine headland beside the hotel. Three hundred rooms of glass. A private beach club. And a deadline: midnight, the thirty-first of December.

Grace Delaney has fought for this house before. But she has never faced a rival like Vivienne Curran - the CEO who learned the trade at six a.m. behind the front desk of the old Hotel Marchand in New York, was laid off with a list one December morning, and was never once asked to stay.

Grace cannot outspend the machine. So the house does the only thing it has ever known how to do. It answers its letters. It pours the four o'clock tea. It opens a book and starts counting the people for whom a place is worth more than its price - a Baroness, a Braga postman, a class of nine-year-olds subscribing on behalf of the owls - while a demolition manager flies in from New York to show a small Portuguese town exactly what "the after" looks like.

And in December, under her own name at last, the woman in gray arrives for ten nights.

From the storm-birth of a baby in the dining room to a resignation that stops a boardroom cold, THE WINTER GUESTS is a novel about the two ideas of welcome - the one that is priced, and the one that is kept. Perfect for readers of Danielle Steel, Rosanna Ley, and Jenny Colgan: a story of grand hotels, found family, letters that come back, and the one thing money has never learned to buy.