Author(s): Emily St. John Mandel

Novel | Read our reviews! | Dystopia, Science Fiction and Fantasy

'A damn fine novel . . . haunting and evocative and immersive' George R R Martin, author of A Game of ThronesThe extraordinary novel from the bestselling, award-winning author of Station Eleven.Vincent is the beautiful bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star glass-and-cedar palace on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island. New York financier Jonathan Alkaitis owns the hotel. When he passes Vincent his card with a tip, it's the beginning of their life together. That same day, a hooded figure scrawls a note on the windowed wall of the hotel: 'Why don't you swallow broken glass.' Leon Prevant, a shipping executive for a company called Neptune-Avramidis, sees the note from the hotel bar and is shaken to his core. Thirteen years later Vincent mysteriously disappears from the deck of a Neptune-Avramidis ship. Weaving together the lives of these characters, Emily St. John Mandel's The Glass Hotel moves between the ship, the towers of Manhattan, and the wilderness of remote British Columbia, painting a breathtaking picture of greed and guilt, fantasy and delusion, art and the ghosts of our pasts.ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVOURITE BOOKS OF 2020PRAISE FOR THE GLASS HOTEL'A lovely, beautifully written and constructed novel that I couldn't put down, full of memorable, unusual characters... Mandel's agility with time in this story was a marvel.' Kristin Hannah, author of The Nightingale'Elegant . . . beguiling . . . the joys of The Glass Hotel are participatory: piecing together the connections and intersections of Mandel's human cartography, a treasure map ripped to pieces' Guardian'Though its characters were inspired by Bernie Madoff, his victims, and his enablers, there's much more to this novel than ripped-from-the-headlines voyeurism; it's a gorgeously constructed tapestry, each jewellike sentence building to one of the most devastating, moving endings in recent memory. I read it when I was feeling uniquely exhausted by the demands of COVID-era living; I still couldn't put it down.' Vanity Fair'Long-anticipated... At its heart, this is a ghost story in which every boundary is blurred, from the moral to the physical... In luminous prose, Mandel shows how easy it is to become caught in a web of unintended consequences and how disastrous it can be when such fragile bonds shatter under pressure. A strange, subtle, and haunting novel.' Kirkus Reviews, starred'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.' NPR'A wondrously entertaining novel... The Glass Hotel is never dull. Tracing the permutations of its characters' lives, from depressing apartments in bad neighborhoods to posh Dubai resorts to Manhattan bars, Colorado campgrounds, and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival is like following the intricate patterns on Moroccan tiles.' Slate'Mandel's wonderful novel (after Station Eleven) follows a brother and sister as they navigate heartache, loneliness, wealth, corruption, drugs, ghosts, and guilt... This ingenious, enthralling novel probes the tenuous yet unbreakable bonds between people and the lasting effects of momentary carelessness.' Publishers Weekly, starred

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READ STELLA'S REVIEW:
Mirage and subterfuge, reality and counterlives, transformation and invention are the players in Emily St.John Mandel’s latest novel. Her previous novel, Station Eleven, was centred in the aftermath of worldly collapse, complete with a pandemic. The Glass Hotel takes us back to the early 2000s, with its escalating wealth capital and house-of-cards financial boom and bust. Vincent is an attractive young woman loitering in her hometown, working as a bartender at an upmarket exclusive hotel on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island: The Glass Hotel, owned by financier Jonathan Alkaitis. The night Vincent and Alkaitis meet, an unnerving action has occurred: someone had written graffiti on the glass window of the entry lounge. “Why don’t you swallow broken glass.” A message for Alkaitis we presume — one he never sees — but which shakes Vincent and a guest, shipping executive Leon Prevant, to the core. What does it mean? And why has someone bothered to display this message so viciously (when its target could have easily been accessed in New York), in one of the remotest places Vincent knows, a place she describes as two roads to nowhere. The novel opens and closes with a first-person narrative of falling through the ocean — it is lyrical and strangely eerie. A ghostly theme that recurs in several places in The Glass Hotel — either with hallucinatory drugs or stress-induced experiences, or within the counterlife narratives of Alkaitis. Between these ocean fallings, we follow Vincent, her half-brother Paul, and Alkaitis as their lives unfold and intertwine. Here is the complacency of being a ‘trophy wife’, the denial of a crime (Alkaitis’s financial activities parallel Bernie Madoff’s schemes and his eventual downfall) and the stories one tells to justify rotten behaviour and errors of judgement. Paul is shallow, but wanting to be wonderful — a recovering drug addict who will stoop to any depths to pull himself up. Alkaitis is successful, blooming with the confidence of money. Vincent is ready and able to reinvent herself with merely a blink of an eye. In The Glass Hotel, we move in the dance-drug scene, we traipse through the mundanity of dead-end jobs and the precariat class, we luxuriate in the world of the moneyed, and edge into the knife-sharpened pretence of the art scene. But mostly what we are called out for, as are all the players in this game, is our complacency in being part of this structure. As Alkaitis sits in jail, he questions who is the biggest crook: his criminal activity — a Ponzi scheme — or the investors who want more and better returns on their precious dollars? When Vincent starts life again after her days with Jonathan, can she escape her belief that she knew nothing? When Paul becomes a well-known avant-garde composer can he let loose his demons? Hauntings pervade The Glass Hotel.  Emily St.John Mandel’s excellent writing, from the main threads to the bit players, familiar settings as well as oblique passages, makes The Glass Hotel a fascinating, compelling novel. The more you walk away from The Glass Hotel, the more it will come back to you with its questioning voice and its insistence that responsibility is necessary and long overdue — a  haunting that refuses to be quiet.