It was awarded the Cheltenham Prize in Britain, and critics there eventually came around. It was, Publishers Weekly wrote, “the sleeper novel of the season.” “The White Hotel” sold nearly 100,000 copies in hardback and more than a million copies in paperback. Prescott wrote, “‘The White Hotel’ is in its conception and design a daring enterprise, brought off with dazzling virtuosity.”

Thomas, but not so easy to get out,” Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote in The New York Times. “It is easy to get into this strange and beautiful new novel by the English poet D.M. Then it caught fire, as Americans responded enthusiastically to the novel’s blend of psychoanalysis, fantasy and historical fact. Thomas described as “restrained approval,” before its publication in the United States.

It had sold only a few hundred copies in Britain, where it met with what Mr. Told in unorthodox fashion, through letters exchanged between Freud and his colleagues, long sexual fantasies written by Lisa in verse and prose, and a case study written by the fictional Freud, the novel leaps forward in time, following Lisa’s post-treatment career and her horrific death at Babi Yar. “The White Hotel” tells the story of Lisa Erdman, a half-Jewish opera singer who comes to Sigmund Freud seeking treatment for her psychosomatic pains. Thomas told People magazine in 1981, “and realized I had a novel.” “Suddenly, I saw a connection between the mass hysteria of the Holocaust and personal hysterias,” Mr. By chance, he began reading Anatoly Kuznetsov’s documentary novel “Babi Yar,” about the slaughter of 100,000 mostly Jewish Ukrainians near Kiev in 1941, and the light bulb went on. Thomas was a former English teacher with a modest literary reputation when he began planning a novel in the style of a Freudian case study. Thomas, the English novelist whose ingenious interweaving of Freudian themes and the Holocaust made “The White Hotel” a surprise best seller in 1981, died on Sunday at his home in Truro, a small city in the Cornwall region of southern England.

The white hotel by dm thomas