The word “hotel” is cognate with “hostel” and “hospital”, and for a few short years in the middle of the 20th century, one Paris establishment functioned as all three. Hôtel Lutetia sits on the city’s Left Bank and exudes a certain nonconformist swagger. Opened in 1910 and built in a style that bobbed between art nouveau and art deco, it soon attracted an artistic and bohemian crowd. Hemingway hung out there in the 1920s, as did Picasso, Matisse and André Gide. James Joyce, resident in the city for 20 years, wrote a chunk of Ulysses sitting at one of its tables.

In this outstanding book, which has been shortlisted for the Women’s prize for nonfiction, Jane Rogoyska reports that by the mid-1930s the Lutetia had become headquarters to German political dissidents fleeing Hitler. “The Lutetia Crowd”, as the Nazis disdainfully dubbed them, comprised the intellectual cream of the Weimar Republic. Heinrich Mann, novelist brother of the more famous Thomas, was the head of the organising committee that worked to bring down the Nazi regime from a distance. To this end, fake tomato-seed packets were sent into Germany containing a diatribe against the Third Reich and The Communist Manifesto was rebound into classic literature and pumped into the Fatherland.

When they weren’t tampering with tomato seeds, these former lawyers, academics and journalists spent their days tramping around the City of Light in increasingly shabby clothing, trying to persuade someone to give them a job, any job. Even this misery, though, was nothing compared with the hellish conditions that arrived with the occupation of Paris in 1940. Under Hitler’s Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog) initiative, any émigré or refugee could now be arrested without legal due process. Most of the Lutetia circle found themselves reclassified as stateless aliens, an utterly defenceless position. For those who were Jewish, there was every chance of being sent to concentration camps in the east.

Having set up the Lutetia as the focus of her book, Rogoyska then traces a number of individual stories. Some of these have been told many times before. There is Walter Benjamin, who spends all his days at the Bibliotheque Nationale perfecting his life’s work on The Arcades Project, a study of the street life of 19th-century Paris. Then there is Irène Némirovsky, the Ukraine-born author who is secretly writing Suite Française, a novel depicting the fear, desperation and moral compromises of ordinary citizens during the German invasion. Gisèle Freund, a young German photographer and a lesbian, has already taken the precaution of making a mariage blanc to a Frenchman in order to gain citizenship.

Mostly it doesn’t end well. Benjamin kills himself after failing to escape over the border into Spain and a significant part of his Arcades manuscript is lost. Némirovsky dies in Auschwitz, although her Suite Française will be published decades later to great acclaim. Freund lives to 91, having become one of the most celebrated photographers of the 20th century. The Lutetia, meanwhile, experiences its own nadir. The day after the Germans arrived, the hotel was designated as the headquarters of the Abwehr, the Nazi intelligence service. At its head was Adm Wilhelm Canaris, a fluent French speaker and connoisseur of fine wine, who routinely insisted on an extra room for his two beloved dachshunds. For the junior officers, being at the Lutetia, which retained its French staff and atmosphere of frictionless luxury, made them feel simultaneously sophisticated and self-conscious. When served artichoke at dinner, one man munched on the spiky bits and started to choke. The Lutetia’s chef was angrily summoned and accused of sabotage until one German, more sophisticated than the rest, explained to his spluttering colleague which bit of the artichoke was edible.

In the third and final part, Rogoyska’s book soars to great heights. After the Germans fled the Lutetia in disarray in August 1944, it was turned into a repatriation centre for the survivors of concentration camps. Following the liberations of spring 1945, buses and trainloads of emaciated figures, still wearing their striped uniforms, limped through the hotel’s grand wooden revolving door. Housed in bedrooms that until recently had been occupied by Admiral Canaris’s men, these survivors now received medical care, new clothing and nourishing food.

The Lutetia was not, as Rogoyska is careful to point out, a place of tearful reunions and happy endings. Many of the hotel’s latest guests would be returning to a world bereft of their loved ones. On the pavement outside the hotel, hundreds of tearful men and women held up photographs of relatives who had last been seen boarding a train heading east. Could the returnees tell them whether they recognised their son, their aunt, their husband from the camps? The people in the striped pyjamas barely looked. They knew that, even if by some fluke they could identify a face in the picture, there was little chance that person would ever walk through the Lutetia’s rotating door.

For Paul Scraton, a British writer who has lived in Berlin for over 20 years, place is what you carry around in your imagination. The acknowledgments to his second novel inform us that on Holy Island/Ynys Gybi in north Wales there is a rock face called A Dream of White Horses. The novel transposes this name to the Baltic Sea, which surrounds an unnamed island – evidently Hiddensee on the German coast – where an itinerant photographer, Pascal, once spent his childhood summers. His grandfather was originally from German Swinemünde, which became Polish Świnoujście, and his parents lived in the GDR before moving to Lancashire when he was nine.

They are all exiles from Germanys that, in a memorable phrase, have been “separated from their dead” by the redrawing of European frontiers. All three generations restlessly seek escape and rest from escape, and all return to a beloved island where none of them was born. The desire for homeland is not an atavistic birthright but a voluntary sense of belonging to Europe’s “continent of refugees”.

Pascal is too unwell to pick up a photography award in London: it is the narrator Ben, his British friend from university days, who goes in his stead. Just as Pascal feels detached from Germany, so Ben, long a resident of Berlin, writes of his native England as an increasingly foreign country. It is with a sense of urgency that Pascal has asked his friend to bring the award to the island and to act as his ghostwriter by transcribing a sequence of autobiographical voice notes. In one, Pascal remembers meeting a fellow walker in the sunless depths of a spectacular gorge in Japan. When asked where he is from, the man points at his feet: “here”. Pascal contrasts that certainty to his own transience, though it could be that the walker feels rooted to the “here” of the present.

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The novel has begun with descriptions of Pascal’s photographs: a fragmented headstone; a single-track railway line disappearing into mist; a sandy trail through the woods. This is his prize-winning work, some of which we later recognise in the voice notes. The narrative is interspersed with paragraphs that describe ordinary photographs of the rooms that Pascal has stayed in: rooms that have confined the spirit of the rucksack-carrying wanderer. The nondescript word-pictures assert the photograph’s stubborn materiality in a selfie-saturated age. But Pascal also asks whether these photographs of empty rooms are redundant prompts, which misleadingly prioritise certain memories over others.

In a novel that wishes to stage a debate between image, word and story, the absence of photographs themselves represents a missed opportunity. The reader is denied the intermedial complexity of WG Sebald’s fiction, to cite an obvious example. There is little of that affective penetration Roland Barthes refers to as the punctum of a photograph: what “pricks” us with mortality.

Pascal has tried to remake a “personal geography” of his native country. He familiarises himself with the Berlin he does not remember from early childhood, and he takes a crash course in the German history he was not taught. Making the classic tourist trip down the Rhine, he learns that Heinrich Heine’s Die Lorelei, which captured the mood of the nation, was later attributed by the Nazis to an “Unknown German Author” (Heine was Jewish). Pascal’s melancholic desire to fill a cultural and linguistic void is a dream of white horses, which cannot ward off an increasing psychological insularity. In this novel, rooms and islands, whether cells or refuges, are metaphors of containment that recursively frame and surround each other. By the time Ben has reached Pascal’s “island of the imagination”, his final task is to take a photograph of his friend’s old bedroom from those childhood summers spent on the Baltic. He captures a last view of the room with the view.

Yuri Herrera’s evocative novella, crisply translated by Lisa Dillman, follows the real-life fortunes of Benito Juárez in the cultural melange of 1853 New Orleans. The former governor of Oaxaca was to become Mexico’s first indigenous president, but landed in the US city after he was exiled by his country’s autocratic leader, Antonio López de Santa Anna.

Juárez’s silence about his 18-month sojourn in New Orleans is a gift for a Mexican writer such as Herrera, whose 2020 work, A Silent Fury, reconstructed a 1920 mining tragedy in his home town of Pachuca. Herrera currently teaches at Tulane University in New Orleans, and one can see the appeal of researching and writing a speculative account of a Mexican hero in a landscape you’re exploring yourself. His careful layering of detail is clearly gleaned from newspaper archives and other historical documents.

Herrera brilliantly conveys Juárez’s disorientation on arrival at the city’s port, his attempts to understand the language and the “not being seen”. He has a lot of fun imagining the strait-laced lawyer’s experience of the Mardi Gras (the “spontaneous parades”, “bonfires and drums”, “the clamour of celebration”), the various “coffee shops” he frequents with his fellow conspirators, and the yellow fever epidemic Juárez and his travelling companion, Pepe, are fortunate to survive.

However, the book’s main plot involves the rescue of an escaped slave after Juárez witnesses the plantation owners’ insidious trade of “hands”. “Hands with no person. But of course, each pair of hands had a person. They could convince themselves that what they were doing wasn’t being done to a person if they called them hands.” Later, Juárez watches a wealthy New Yorker call over a waiter to remove a feather that has landed on his shoulder – “and that too was a horror: what have we lost when you can’t shake off your own jacket or wash a single dish, when comfort is your only concern”.

These vividly imagined encounters, Herrera suggests, helped fuel Juárez’s desire to emancipate his own people on his return to Mexico.

• Season of the Swamp by Yuri Herrera (translated by Lisa Dillman) is published by And Other Stories (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply