From the critically acclaimed author of Lady Moses comes a beautifully written, passionate new novel about sisterhood, love, and identity set against the backdrop of an African country torn by revolution.
In The Hotel Alleluia, Lucinda Roy tells the story of two half sisters, one white and one black, who share the same mother. Separated at a young age, they grow up continents apart. Joan is raised in North Carolina and becomes an independent, successful businesswoman. Ursuline is left behind as an orphan in Africa, where she teaches art and English at a convent school and tries to decide if she has a vocation for the sisterhood.
Driven by their mother's death and the shadow of loneliness that haunts her own life, Joan departs for Africa to reclaim Ursuline. Soon after she finds her, the two sisters witness a tragedy that forces them to flee the country's growing civil unrest. In the process, Ursuline has no choice but to seek help from Joan's former lover, Gordon Delacroix, a Peace Corps director, and his troubled English friend, Jeremy Scott. The days they spend together in a quickly disintegrating nation will change each of them forever.
A path of events--emotional, powerful, an tragic--eventually takes the women back to the United States. Moving from a country plagued by violence and bloodshed to another almost overwhelming in its possibilities, the sisters are forced to question their beliefs and rediscover their faith in family and in each other.
An extraordinary, unforgettable book, The Hotel Alleluia is a story not just about racial identity but about the people and places that color our lives-shaping our shared history and our separate fates. With her second novel, Lucinda Roy proves again that she is one of the most talented and original new voices in African American fiction.
