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An Intimate History of Communism's Forgotten Radicals
by Maurice Casey
The extraordinary story of a group of forgotten radicals who found themselves drawn to communist Moscow's hotbed of international revolutionary activity: the Hotel Lux.
Hotel Lux follows Irish radical May O'Callaghan and her friends, three revolutionary families brought together by their vision for a communist future and their time spent in the Comintern's Moscow living quarters, the Hotel Lux.
Historian Maurice Casey reveals the connections and disconnections of a group of forgotten communist activists whose lives collided in 1920s Moscow: a brilliant Irish translator, a maverick author, the rebel daughters of an East London Jewish family, and a family of determined German anti-fascists.
The dramatic and interlocking histories of the O'Flahertys, Cohens and Leonhards offer an intimate insight into the legacies of the Russian Revolution from its earliest idealism through to the brutal Stalinist purges and beyond. Hotel Lux uncovers a world of forgotten radicals who saw their hopes and dreams crash against reality yet retained their faith in a beautiful future for all.
Culminating in a queer love story that saw the daughters of the Cohens and Leonhards create an enduring partnership even as their parents' political visions crumbled, this is a multi-generational rebel odyssey and a history of international communism, one which looks as much to the future as it does to the past.
"[A] vibrant debut...Told in novelistic prose and narrated like an archival detective story, this enchants." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
This information about Hotel Lux was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Maurice Casey is an Irish historian of 20th century revolutionary movements with a particular focus on international communism, and is also an also an expert in Irish diaspora history, queer history and the impact of grassroots activism in modern Ireland.
With degrees from Trinity College Dublin and Cambridge University, he is a Fulbright Scholar and also studied at Stanford and Oxford before joining Queen's University, Belfast as a Research Fellow. In addition to academic journals, his writing has appeared in the Irish Times, History Today, History Ireland, Contingent Magazine and others. He has spoken to public audiences in Ireland, the UK, Russia, and the US.
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