Walter Kappacher (1938-2024) was an Austrian novelist who won many German language literary awards including the prestigious Georg Büchner Prize. He wrote short stories and novels as well as radio and screenplays, and lived near Salzburg.

"An aging Hugo von Hofmannsthal returns to a summer resort outside of Salzburg that he visited as a child. But in the spa town where he once thrilled to the joys of youth, he now feels unproductive and uninspired, adrift in the modern world born after World War One. Over ten days in 1924 in a ramshackle inn that has been renamed the Grand Hotel, Hofmannsthal fruitlessly attempts to complete a play he's long been wrestling with."--