Troubles by JG Farrell

It's 1919 and Major Archer has returned from war to the fiancée he barely knows, and finds himself in her father Edward's once-splendid Hotel Majestic on the Irish coast. The now-crumbling building and the anxious elderly guests echo the country's disintegration. Farrell is the master of detail: when Edward finds his beloved pigs hacked to death their blood oozes through the eyelets of his shoes. A superb narration of one of the finest novels of the 20th century.