LADIES NIGHT AT FINBAR'S HOTEL [Hardcover]

DERMOT BOLGER (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 257 pages
• Publisher: PICADOR (2000)
• ISBN-10: 033039763X
• ISBN-13: 978-0330397636
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,758,667 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Maeve Binchy is the author of numerous best-selling books, including Nights of Rain and Stars, Quentins, Scarlet Feather, Circle of Friends, and Tara Road, which was an Oprah's Book Club selection. She has written for Gourmet; O, The Oprah Magazine; Modern Maturity; and Good Housekeeping, among other publications. She and her husband, Gordon Snell, live in Dalkey, Ireland, and London.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Spend One Busy Night In a Dublin Hotel, April 4, 2000

By 

Antoinette Klein (Hoover, Alabama USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Ladies' Night at Finbar's Hotel (Paperback)

This is a sometimes touching, sometimes funny story of one night in the nouveau chic Finbar's Hotel of Dublin. You will meet a woman getting impregnated by her best friend's husband, a career woman and her crazy father, a bride-to-be who gets the ultimate revenge on an old boyfriend who did her wrong, a nun looking for love in a most unorthodox manner, a mother reunited with the son she gave up for adoption, a woman who follows her husband to find out if he's cheating on her, and an aging actress who wants to recapture the past. Their paths all cross on one night at this hotel.

I chose the book because I am a big fan of Maeve Binchy and she wrote one of the chapters. Guessing which author wrote which chapter becomes a guessing game for the reader familiar with these authors.

This is not as good as Binchy's own novels, but definitely enjoyable and worth your time.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not As Good As the Original, December 3, 2001

By 

A. Ross (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Ladies' Night at Finbar's Hotel (Paperback)

This is the second "Finbar's Hotel," collection edited by Bolger, and this one is given over to seven Irish women writers: Maeve Binchy, Clare Boylan, Emma Donoghue, Anne Haverty, Eilis Ni Dhibhne, Kate O'Riordan and Deirdre Purcell. As in the first one (which had only two women, Anne Enright and Jennifer Johnston), each writer is given a "room" of the hotel, and creates a guest and a story to explain their presence at the hotel. And as in the first one, the writer of each story is not identified. One has to wonder at the point of such cleverness, as it is a directly impedes any attempt on the reader's part to discover a new writer to seek out in the future. For example, say I find two of the seven stories to be amazing, what am I to do? Buy one book by each of the seven writers and read all seven to figure out whose writing it was that I liked? Since there's no real purpose to keeping the authors secret (other than editorial conceit), why do it?

The strongest stories reside in rooms 101 and 106, which contain stories that revolve around marital infidelity, but have gentle reversals. Room 104 also concerns infidelity, but in this case, to God-and is much less interesting. Rooms 102, 103, 105 and the penthouse all contain guests coming from abroad and their stories all revolve around encounters with their past. Room 105, which concerns a mother meeting her son for the first time is perhaps the best of them, although the penthouse story is worth reading for the ending if nothing else. One sort of odd running thread is the clumsy mocking of Americans that appears in each story, which is in contrast the generally gentle tone of the collection. All in the all, the collection is inoffensive, but not quite as strong as the original Finbar's Hotel.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful Secrets, March 27, 2000

By 

Stacey Glenney - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ladies' Night at Finbar's Hotel (Paperback)

"Ladies Night at Finbars Hotel" is a great book. I am a big fan of Maeve Binchy's writing, and am waiting for her next book to come out. Meanwhile I saw she had contributed to this book, so I picked it up.

For those of you familiar with Binchy's writing, you'll notice how every chapter leads into the next, and the characters lives intertwine. The same happens in this book.

Each chapter revolves around a guest in a particular room. One truly becomes engrossed in their lives.

The writers all write along the same vein, so it is actually difficult to tell which author wrote which chapter. But that does not matter, all that matters is it is a good book which you will not want to put down. Order it today!