Part history, part travel journal and part autobiography, 'Hotel Tiberias' is a journey of many layers and resonances, as Sebastian Hope follows the tumultuous story of his family's hotel in Palestine.

In 1900, Thomas Cook, who had been running tours of the Holy Land since the 1890s, financed the building of a hotel in Tiberias, the largest town on the Sea of Galilee, which had long been a stopover point for Christian pilgrims. The hotel, built, run and eventually owned by Richard Grossmann, was situated in the Sanjak of Acre, part of the Ottoman Empire, and after the First World War...