In July 1924, a century ago, an Irish woman began a journey that would change her life — and, in a way, transform my own too.
On 10 July 1924, May O’Callaghan, a translator and writer from rural Wexford, received this certificate granting her access to the headquarters of the Communist International:
Resident in Soviet Moscow from 1924 to 1928, she witnessed a city and movement undergoing a moment of extraordinary transformation. During this period, she lived in room five of Moscow’s famous Hotel Lux.
I never planned it to land like this but, fortuitously, my book will be published one hundred years after May O’Callaghan first arrived in Moscow.
Hotel Lux tells May’s story, and the stories of the remarkable group of friends and comrades she created in 1920s Moscow. It traces the history of international communism through these friendships, culminating in a queer romance that owed its existence to May O’Callaghan’s Moscow world.
It would mean a great deal if you would consider pre-ordering the book ahead of its release. It comes out on 26 August in the UK and Ireland and on 8 October in North America.
Just click on the big book to pre-order:
I have compiled links to some of the best places to pre-order. A local bookseller will be able to reserve you a copy too, of course. I hope to see you at one of the launches. The first takes place in Dublin in Books Upstairs on 22 August.
Here are some of the extraordinarily generous things people have already said about Hotel Lux:
Casey is a dazzling new voice in Irish writing. HOTEL LUX is an extraordinary debut, one that weaves together years of research to create a rich tapestry of the ordinary lives of forgotten revolutionaries. There's real beauty here, as stories of Moscow's Hotel Lux burst from the page to begin their afterlives in reader's imaginations. It's astoundingly brilliant, propulsive, compulsive, and deeply moving. I couldn't put it down once I checked into the Hotel Lux.
— Aimée Walsh, author of Exile
An extraordinary trip through 20th century history, grounded in the singular characters occupying a single hotel in 1920s Moscow. This is a fascinating tale of exiles and emigres, zealots and dreamers, brought to thrumming life by an extraordinary cache of private letters, and Casey's superb and propulsive portraiture. A historical, and humane, tour de force.
— Séamas O’Reilly, author of Did Ye Hear Mummy Died?
Tells the story of early 20th century communism through the eyes of those who lived it and felt and believed in it – while also living their entirely normal, rackety, emotional lives
— Hallie Rubenhold, author of The Five
I loved this sweeping, thrilling Romance of Irish Communism - and American, English, German, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian Communism. Hotel Lux takes the old history of the left and makes it fresh, new and moving.
— Owen Hatherley, author of Landscapes of Communism
Hotel Lux illuminates the intertwined lives of a group of self-described ”restless souls with impossible desires”, moving between a legendary Moscow hotel, Weimar Berlin, 1920s Manhattan, London’s East End and the west of Ireland. Maurice Casey writes with vivid empathy and his impressive research skills uncover complex networks of politics, ideology and love. A remarkably accomplished reconstruction of a forgotten world, its ideals, disappointments and delusions
— Roy Foster, Emeritus Professor of Irish History, University of Oxford
Casey takes us inside the fabled Hotel Lux, a place where revolutionaries, dreamers and agitators shared food, beds and doctrine, and reveals in exquisite detail how this Moscow building became a crucible in which ideals were tested, and lives forever entwined.
— Simon Parkin, New Yorker contributing writer
Beautifully written and researched. Full of the fire of curiosity and the magic of discovery, Hotel Lux is a book that uncovers the radical in the everyday, the everyday in the radical.
— Seán Hewitt, winner of the Laurel Prize, 2021
Maurice Casey's Hotel Lux is a rich and bracing work that brings to fresh light a fascinating new contour in the history of transcontinental communism.
— Adrian Duncan, author of The Geometer Lobachevsky
Hotel Lux is an enthralling debut, from a brilliant young scholar, that finds the messy, honest humanity at the heart of an epic ideological tsunami. Dr Maurice Casey has carefully and generously revived a doomed generation of extraordinary friends, lovers, neighbours, comrades, and family-members whose fizzing revolutionary idealism was slowly crushed between the jaws of Stalinism and Nazism.
— Greg Jenner, host of BBC Radio 4’s You’re Dead to Me
I loved this book… A story of ordinary people attempting the extraordinary: to follow their dream of building a more just world… There’s also great humour and lightness of touch not always found in such an impeccably researched historical account