The Girl from the Grand Hotel

Aubray’s fun and surprising third novel (after 2021’s The Godmothers) follows a 20-year-old American woman on the French Riviera during the birth of the Cannes Film Festival in summer 1939. Earlier in the year, Annabel Faucon faced the untimely deaths of her mother and father, from the flu and a heart attack, respectively. Her uncle JP, who manages the Grand Hôtel du Cap des Rêves, invites her to visit and offers her a job typing up scripts for F. Scott Fitzgerald, who befriends Annabel and warns her about fickle Hollywood types. Annabel also acts as a translator and tour guide for matinee idol Jack Cabot and his German actor girlfriend Téa Marlo. Annabel quickly falls for Jack, who’s trying to scout locations to make his own film. The initial two-thirds of the novel verge on frothy escapism as Annabel hobnobs with the rich and famous, who conveniently take a shine to her, but all the while Aubray has set the stage for deeper themes of exploitation, the reach of fascism, and the limits of political loyalty, as Téa is frequently courted by Nazi officials who want her to do favors for their regime and Jack schemes to make Annabel a star. Readers will be swept away. Agent: Susan Golomb, Writers House. (Apr.)