Rooms Written Into History: The Hotels Hiding Inside Great Books

READ IT → SLEEP IN IT: every book in this article is paired with the real hotel behind it, and whether you can book it with us.

The Stanley Hotel in Colorado, where The Shining was born, and the Metropol in Moscow, where A Gentleman in Moscow takes place, are both bookable through SherryStay.

The Old Cataract in Aswan, the hotel in Death on the Nile, is bookable with us.

Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc of Tender Is the Night and The Plaza of The Great Gatsby were not for sale with us on the dates we checked; each is paired with a nearby hotel you can book.

Stephen King's Overlook, Arthur Hailey's St. Gregory and John Irving's Hotel New Hampshire are fictional hotels.

We have to start with The Shining. Not only because it is one of the most famous books with a hotel at its centre, but because of the story behind it.

In late September 1974, Stephen King and his wife Tabitha arrived at The Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado. By King's own account, they turned out to be the only guests — the next day the hotel was closing for the winter.

That night he dreamed of his three-year-old son running through the corridors, looking back over his shoulder, eyes wide, screaming, chased by a fire hose. He woke with a jolt, got up, lit a cigarette and sat in the chair looking out of the window at the Rockies. By the time the cigarette was done, he said, he had the bones of the book.

The Shining was published in January 1977.

In the novel, the Torrance family moves into the Overlook Hotel, an isolated mountain hotel that shuts for the winter. Jack Torrance takes the job of winter caretaker, the roads close under snow, and the family is left alone with an empty hotel and a history that is far less empty. The Overlook is fiction. The Stanley — built in 1909 — is entirely real.

And the hotel does not run from the connection. Quite the opposite: it presents Room 217 as the room where King found the inspiration for The Shining. The Stanley Hotel is bookable through SherryStay. You can come, sleep and walk the corridors. Just remember: if you hear a noise outside your room in the middle of the night, check whether it is another guest before you blame the hotel.

If in The Shining a real hotel dressed up as a fictional one, in A Gentleman in Moscow the opposite happens. The Metropol is real, and Amor Towles keeps it real.

The novel opens in 1922. Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal and sentenced to house arrest — not in an apartment, but in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. From the suite he lived in, he is moved to a small attic room.

And so begins one of the loveliest ideas for a novel set in a hotel: what if you were not allowed to leave it for decades? According to Penguin Random House, the book has more than 2 million readers.

The hotel is not a backdrop. It is Rostov's world: the restaurants, the corridors, the stairs, the staff, the guests. Outside, Russia changes completely, and the hero sees the world through the people who walk through the doors.

That is what makes the Metropol such a lovely case for book lovers. You don't need to hunt for "the hotel that inspired it". This is the hotel: the same name, the same famous building in central Moscow. Suddenly the story has dimensions — the corridor has a width, the ceiling a height, the window a view.

The Metropol Hotel is bookable through SherryStay. Before planning a trip to Russia, check current travel advice and your flight and payment options.

Now to the south of France. Cap d'Antibes, the Mediterranean, summer light and pine trees. Here stands Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc.

It began as the Villa Soleil, built between 1865 and 1870 by Hippolyte de Villemessant, founder of Le Figaro, as a place for writers seeking inspiration. In 1889 it opened as the Grand Hôtel du Cap, and in 1914 the Eden Roc pavilion was built by the sea.

In the 1920s Gerald and Sara Murphy, an American couple, rented the entire hotel for a summer — an unusual move at a time when the Riviera was still a winter destination. Writers and artists followed, among them F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.

Then Fitzgerald did what writers do: he took the world around him and put it into a book. Tender Is the Night came out in 1934, and in it is the Hôtel des Étrangers. The name is fictional; the DNA much less so — the hotel's own history notes that it was immortalised in the novel under that name.

Almost a century later, the hotel and its pool carved into the rock above the sea are still there. But Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc is not currently bookable through SherryStay: we checked it on several dates, including in the summer season, and it was not offered for sale. What you can book on the same peninsula is Cap d'Antibes Beach Hotel — and take Fitzgerald out onto the terrace.

Some hotels don't need a whole book. Sometimes one scene is enough.

In The Great Gatsby, one of the decisive scenes takes place in the parlour of a suite at The Plaza Hotel in New York. Gatsby, Daisy, Tom, Nick and Jordan arrive at the hotel on a hot summer day, and there the confrontation we have been waiting for finally erupts.

Gatsby demands that Daisy tell Tom she never loved him. Tom attacks Gatsby and his past. And the fantasy on which Gatsby built his life begins to crumble. The hotel is not just a location — it shuts the characters in one room, with nowhere to run.

The Plaza, which opened in 1907, still stands by Central Park, and today offers a Gatsby Suite inspired by the 1920s. It is also home to a completely different book: Kay Thompson's Eloise, from 1955, about a little girl who lives at the Plaza. The same hotel, once a stage for drama and once a playground.

The Plaza was not for sale with us on the dates we checked, so it appears here as a story rather than a card. What is bookable through SherryStay is Le Meridien New York, Central Park, on West 57th Street — a base from which to walk to the Plaza, step into the lobby and open chapter seven.

If any writer understood the literary power of travel, it was Agatha Christie. Trains, ships, hotels, strangers who meet briefly and vanish again. For a mystery writer that is an almost perfect structure: everyone came from somewhere else, everyone has a secret, and everyone has a reason to leave.

In 1937 Christie published Death on the Nile. The official Agatha Christie website describes it as among her best-loved and most famous works, and notes that the inspiration came from her travels in Egypt.

This is where a real hotel comes in. Part of the story takes place at the Cataract Hotel in Aswan, before the journey continues up the Nile. The hotel, built by Thomas Cook, still stands on the riverbank and keeps an Agatha Christie Suite. The story that Christie wrote part of the novel there is told again and again, but we found no solid documentation for it — so here it stays a story.

It is exactly the kind of hotel this article is about: not a hotel with a marketing tale glued on decades later, but a place inside the geography of the book itself. You can sit facing the Nile and read the novel while the river the plot was built on flows beneath the window. It is hard to imagine a better book club.

The Old Cataract is bookable through SherryStay. Since May 2026 the hotel has been managed by Mandarin Oriental.

Arthur Hailey did not hide his subject. In 1965 he published Hotel, centred on the St. Gregory, an independent hotel in New Orleans. The hotel is fictional — but here you don't need a single famous scene. The whole machinery of a hotel is the story.

The guests, the staff, the management, the money, the service, the crises, and everything that happens behind the scenes that an ordinary guest never sees.

The idea feels even more relevant today. We walk into a hotel and see a tidy room. But for that room to be ready on time, an enormous system runs behind it: people, housekeeping, maintenance, reservations, kitchen, finance and service. Hailey took that machine and opened it up to the reader.

In The Hotel New Hampshire, the hotel is no longer just a building. It is a dream that keeps returning in the life of the Berry family.

John Irving built a saga in which the idea of a "hotel" becomes almost a state of mind: a temporary place people try to turn into a home.

And that is an interesting point. A hotel is, by definition, a place you leave; you arrive knowing you will check out. But what happens when the people who run it live inside it? What looks like one night to a guest becomes a whole life for someone else.

Read enough of these books and a pattern emerges: a hotel is one of the most perfect literary settings we have ever invented.

Under one roof you might find a honeymoon couple, a businesswoman, a family, a millionaire, a writer, someone running from something, and someone who just came to rest. They don't know each other, but for one night they all share an address.

There are corridors where they cross, lifts, a bar, a lobby and closed doors. And most important of all: nobody really knows what is happening in the room next door.

For a mystery writer that is a gift. For a romance writer it is an opportunity. And for Stephen King? Probably best to just close the hotel for the winter.

It cuts us off from ordinary life. We are not at home: not our chair, not our kitchen, not our neighbours. We are in a temporary place where the rules are slightly different.

People fall in love in hotels, break up, meet in secret, make decisions, and wake up not knowing for a moment where they are.

That is one reason a hotel works so well in a book. It lets the writer lift a character out of everyday life and into an in-between space — not at home, and not yet at the next destination.

You can read The Shining at home, or you can travel to Colorado and sleep at the Stanley. You can read Tender Is the Night on a plane, or take it to Cap d'Antibes. You can imagine the Metropol, or stand in front of it. You can open The Great Gatsby in New York and then walk into the Plaza. And you can read Agatha Christie with the Nile flowing past the window.

That creates a different kind of travel. Not following a view, food or a beach. Following a story.

Maybe this is a new way to choose a hotel: instead of starting with the destination, start with the bookshelf. Choose a book you loved, find out where it happened, check whether the place still exists — and then book a room.