Review of Room 706 by Ellie Levenson

Kate meets her lover in a hotel room. Room 706 to be exact. As they’re getting ready to leave, she sees on the news that their hotel has been taken hostage. This is where the nightmare begins.

Room 706 is a really human and interesting look at the way we act and feel towards our lives when it may or may not be coming to an end. Before death, it’s said our life flashes before our eyes and Ellie Levenson really grasps this concept and runs with it in the most human way possible.

Through Kate’s memories, we are carried back to the moment she meets Vic, her loving husband, while travelling in Italy. We sit with her in her most fragile, grief-soaked moments, reliving the memories of the people who have shaped her life and led her to this point, while she quietly questions how she has ended up in this room, beside a man who is not her husband.

This is very much a literary fiction novel, but for me, it had a strange essence of being a thriller to some degree, in a standing on a cliff edge considering whether or not to jump into the abyss or stay a safe distance away from the dive. The claustrophobic, almost locked-room atmosphere heightens that tension, while Ellie guides us through Kate’s grief and disorientation as she wrestles with the life she has potentially lost, and the question of whether she truly wants to return to it.

And that ending... REELING!

Reviewed by Danielle

Published on 15/01/26 by Headline

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