The Last Guest ebook

At 6:41 on a September morning an email reaches sixty-four addresses: the Meridian Athens will cease operations on the thirty-first of October, at noon. Ariadne Vlachos, who has kept the front desk on Odos Panepistimiou for sixteen years and, since the director left, has quietly kept the whole house, reads it twice. Her first response is not grief. It is a schedule. Nikos Meridian arrives that afternoon with a suitcase and a black notebook. He has closed four hotels already and keeps the names of everyone he could not place afterwards. For forty-seven days he and Ariadne sit on opposite sides of a consultation procedure — service years, severance factors, pension deductions — and on the same side of a plainer question: what a building that is ending still owes the people who hold it up. Around them the house goes on working. A night porter with twenty-nine years of rounds. A laundry manager who knows her mangle better than anyone left in Attica. A chef cooking a storeroom empty. And eleven hundred and six index cards, handwritten, ordered by no one, recording what each returning guest last said. Volume nine of the Meridian series, and a complete novel on its own: an unhurried, exact book about work, dignity and the arithmetic of endings.