Alexander Waugh
“…..a thrilling, tense and heart-wrenching family drama with all the characteristics of a great nineteenth century novel. You simply can’t put it down. The book is a stunner.”
Martin Bell
“The Innkeeper of Taunton has done it again. Kit Chapman has woven in words a richly sourced tapestry of his family’s history. It is no ordinary family, and its dark side is as compelling as its sunlit uplands.”
Rosie Boycott
“This is a brilliant family saga which reads like an exciting novel : intrigue, love and passions intermingle throughout the story of the Chapman family and the Castle Hotel. A truly great read.”
Jonathan Meades
“All families have skeletons. The Chapmans require more than a mere cupboard to contain theirs…. Suicides, shame, inter-generational warfare, jealousy, betrayal…. Kit Chapman is one of England’s greatest hoteliers and the most polished of men. Here he strips himself of all sophistication and shows himself to be a truly potent and elemental writer whose every measured page makes one wince, whose every revelation is harrowing.”
Julian Fellowes
“In his marvellous My Archipelago, Kit Chapman explores the multi-coloured, twisted threads of his own relations, and describes the backdrop to his own extraordinary childhood – filled equally with chaos, eccentricity and love.”
Other reviews of My Archipelago
“Kit Chapman is a hotelier, a lover of literature and music, and strong voice in the councils of the British hospitality and tourist trade. In a quiet moment in his Aegean retreat (the eponymous archipelago) he began an investigation of his family, with predictable results – inopportune loves, strange deaths, bitter rivalries, erotic perversities, fortunes won and lost, even unto his own parents’ generation and immediate family. Chapman makes the most of a s