Salvador Dalí once asked room service at Le Meurice in Paris to send him up a flock of sheep. When they were brought to his room he pulled out a gun and fired blanks at them. George Bernard Shaw tried to learn the tango at Reid's Palace in Madeira, and the details of India's independence were worked out in the ballroom of the Imperial Hotel, Delhi. The world's grandest hotels have provided glamorous backgrounds for some of the most momentous – and most bizarre – events in history. Adrian Mourby is a distinguished hotel historian and travel journalist – and a lover of great hotels. Here he tells the stories of 50 of the world's most magnificent, among them the Adlon in Berlin, the Hotel de Russie in Rome, the Continental in Saigon, Raffles in Singapore, the Dorchester in London, Pera Palace in Istanbul and New York's Plaza, as well as some lesser known grand hotels like the Bristol in Warsaw, the Londra Palace in Venice and the Midland in Morecambe Bay. All human life is to be found in a great hotel, only in a more entertaining form.

Writers' relationships with their surroundings are seldom straightforward. While some, like Jane Austen and Thomas Mann, wrote novels set where they were staying (Lyme Regis and Venice respectively), Victor Hugo penned Les Misérables in an attic in Guernsey and Noël Coward wrote that most English of plays, Blithe Spirit, in the Welsh holiday village of Portmeirion. Award-winning BBC drama producer Adrian Mourby follows his literary heroes around the world, exploring 50 places where great works of literature first saw the light of day. At each destination – from the Brontës' Yorkshire Moors to the New York of Truman Capote, Christopher Isherwood's Berlin to the now-legendary Edinburgh café where J.K. Rowling plotted Harry Potter's first adventures – Mourby explains what the writer was doing there and describes what the visitor can find today of that great moment in literature. Rooms of One's Own takes you on a literary journey from the British Isles to Paris, Berlin, New Orleans, New York and Bangkok and unearths the real-life places behind our best-loved works of literature.

Paternity, genius, and the potency of the written word are examined in this contemporary novel. The chance discovery of a letter sets journalist Bill Wheeler off on an investigation into the often sinister world of Richard Wagner, one of opera's greatest and most controversial composers. As Wheeler delves deeper into the hidden meanings of the letter, he is forced to reexamine his relationship with his beloved daughter Reah, his ex-wife Tamsin, and Libby Ziegler, the American academic who hastened the disintegration of his marriage seven years earlier. Immersed in the dark world of Wagner and his own memories, Wheeler learns important lessons about the necessity of coming to terms with the past in order to move forward. Settings that range from Tel Aviv to London give this poignant work an international feel.

Two couples find themselves increasingly drawn together in this novel of modern relationships. By the author of We think the world of him.