The Glass Hotel
Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star lodging on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island. On the night she meets Jonathan Alkaitis, a hooded figure scrawls a message on the lobby’s glass wall: Why don’t you swallow broken glass. High above Manhattan, a greater crime is committed: Alkaitis’s billion-dollar business is really nothing more than a game of smoke and mirrors. When his scheme collapses, it obliterates countless fortunes and devastates lives. Vincent, who had been posing as Jonathan’s wife, walks away into the night. Years later, a victim of the fraud is hired to investigate a strange occurrence: a woman has seemingly vanished from the deck of a container ship between ports of call.
In this captivating story of crisis and survival, Emily St. John Mandel takes readers through often hidden landscapes: campgrounds for the near-homeless, underground electronica clubs, service in luxury hotels, and life in a federal prison. Rife with unexpected beauty, The Glass Hotel is a captivating portrait of greed and guilt, love and delusion, ghosts and unintended consequences, and the infinite ways we search for meaning in our lives.
Listen to a sample from The Glass Hotel
Praise for The Glass Hotel
Maureen Corrigan,
NPR’s Fresh Air
“A novel that's so absorbing, so fully realized that it draws you out of your own constricted situation and expands your sense of possibilities…The Glass Hotel isn't dystopian fiction; rather it’s “straight” literary fiction, gorgeous and haunting, about the porous boundaries between past and present, the rich and the poor, and the realms of the living and the dead.”
NPR
Michael Shaub,
“The Glass Hotel is a masterpiece, just as good — if not better — than its predecessor. It's a stunning look at how people react to disasters, both small and large, and the temptation that some have to give up when faced with tragedy.”
The New Yorker
Katy Waldman,
“Mandel’s gift is to weave realism out of extremity. She plants her flag where the ordinary and the astonishing meet…She is our bard of waking up in the wrong time line.”
Slate
Laura Miller,
“A remarkable accomplishment…A wondrously entertaining novel about chance, fate, and calamity.”
Entertainment Weekly
David Canfield,
“A master in her prime…[The Glass Hotel] is just as good if not better than her post-apocalyptic triumph: a story of greed and guilt that bends the laws of time, jumps from Vancouver to Wall Street to ships on the open water, conjures ghosts, and confronts parallel universes…A marvel of intricacy from beginning to end.”
