Heroin addiction / Alcohol consumption / Drug use / Overdose / Drowning / Imprisonment
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.
Emily St. John Mandel is a Canadian author of six novels, most recently Sea of Tranquility, which has been translated into 25 languages and was selected by President Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of 2022. The Glass Hotel, which was also on Obama’s list, was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and has been translated into 26 languages. Her book Station Eleven was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, won the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award, and aired as a limited series on HBO Max. She currently lives in New York City and Los Angeles.
-emilymandel.com
Reviewed by Holly Smulski - Employee Engagement and Retention Specialist
The author explores the juxtaposition of wealth and poverty, greed and self-delusion, and the vicious cycle and mutability of life, as each character deals with the crimes of life and others.
This is a moody read. Each character has an interesting mindset that generally leans toward heavy. It’s an easy, quick read - but not lighthearted.
Readers may find it helpful, but not required, to read Mandel’s previous book, Station Eleven, to help give the characters in this book more context