INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: THE NEW YORKER • NPR • TIME • THE WASHINGTON POST • ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY • AND MORE!“The perfect novel … Freshly mysterious.” —The Washington PostFrom the award-winning author of Station Eleven, an exhilarating novel set at the glittering intersection of two seemingly disparate events—the exposure of a massive criminal enterprise and … exhilarating novel set at the glittering intersection of two seemingly disparate events—the exposure of a massive criminal enterprise and the mysterious disappearance of a woman from a ship at sea.
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.
Look for Emily St. John Mandel’s new novel, Sea of Tranquility, coming in April 2022!
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Quarantine is an interesting reading time. I either want to read something so light and fluffy I can’t help but feel good, or, I want to read darkly human, philosophically compelling works that resonate deeply and make me think about how life can be better lived or more impactfully. THE GLASS HOTEL falls into the latter category. A brilliantly structured book, it’s a bit quieter than STATION ELEVEN, but it’s beautifully written, wonderfully realized, and a thoughtful work of art. And I got to interview Emily for A WORD ON WORDS, which was incredible! A favorite author for me.
This book was perfection on every level. I was captivated by every word, every sentence, every page. Best book I’ve read all year. I highly recommend.
The Glass Hotel tells a moving, haunted story, about people and events and choices. It takes place in the woods and in the city, on an island, on a ship, ranging from simple life with only the basics to the rarefied air of the very rich, where life is nothing like most of us know or ever will know. It’s full of fascinating characters – a (mostly) recovering opioid addict, a bartender, cook, wife, artist, hotel concierge, fraudulent investment banker and his victims – all with some little quirk, something that makes you remember them, and makes you ask yourself, “Are we all like that? Just a little bit off?” Everyone has a secret past or hasn’t quite found the happiness, satisfaction or peace they thought their choices, their luck, their wild success would bring them. But what is luck or choice or is this just the way life is? Are those really ghosts they see, or are those just the things and people and events your mind won’t let you forget, always places just at the outside of your vision, to remind you of what was, what is, and what might have been?
The Glass Hotel is a melancholy tale, weaving in and out of these characters’ lives, highlighting turning points and roads not taken, leading to the now and away from the what if? A cloud cover of sadness and regret, not quite happy, hovers over everything. The story is full of lies, loss, anger, hatred, resentment, and fleeting happiness.
Author Emily St. John Mandel has created an environment with a cast of characters so compelling you can’t turn away. Once you meet them you need to follow their stories, and it makes you think about your own life. Have your choices led you to where you are, or is it fate? I received an advance copy of The Glass Hotel from the publisher, Penguin Random House. All opinions are my own. Emily St. John Mandel is an excellent writer and has told an excellent story that I highly recommend.
Beautiful writing!
Thanks to NetGalley and to Picador for providing me an ARC copy of this novel that I freely chose to review. Having read St. John Mandel’s novel Station Eleven almost six years ago, I jumped at the opportunity to read this one. And although the story is quite different, I loved it as well.
Despite the differences between the two novels (Station Eleven was set around and after a virus pandemic that decimated the population and caused major changes to civilization), there are some commonalities. In her new novel, there is also a major event that although not as disastrous and all-encompassing as the pandemic, it has a devastating effect on the lives of all involved, from Jonathan Alkaitis (a character inspired by Bernard Madoff), to the people working at a hotel he owned, and even his receptionist. The collapse of his Ponzi scheme works as an axis around which the rest of the plot and the elements of the story spin, although it is far from evident how all the fragments fit in together when we start reading the novel.
The formal structure of the novel feels almost magical in its perfection. It begins with the end and yes… it ends going back to the beginning, but we get three parts, changes in time frames (always marked, so it does not cause confusion) from the 1950s up to the near future, many of the characters have “before” and “after” lives, and some even create imaginary lives to cope with their dire situation, so at times it seems as if it would be impossible to pull it all together, but the author manages, and it is a delight to follow the clues and be taken in, sometimes, quite unexpected directions. The book is not a thriller per se, but there are plenty of mysteries, lots of secrets, and unexplained events, and all the individual stories are more than interesting enough in their own right to keep us reading.
There are different voices and different narrators, almost as many as characters. Most of the chapters are narrated in the third person, but from only one of the characters point of view at a time, and although at first we don’t know how they are related to each other, there is no confusion as to who is thinking what or what story we are following. There are chapters in the first person, at the very beginning and at the very end of the novel, in a style reminiscent of stream of consciousness, and also chapters that correspond to the chorus of the employees working with Alkaitis in his fraudulent investment company, where we get information about several characters at once. There are many settings, but I think the island and the Glass Hotel of the title work particularly well and function as a focal point, as a hub where many of the players meet and take on paths that will mark their lives forever. The writing is beautiful, compelling, reflective, lyrical, multifaceted, evocative, and a joy to read.
As I mentioned before, the characters are all interesting, although perhaps Alkaitis and his story will sound more familiar than most of the rest. But even he has something that makes him human and easier to empathise with than readers would expect. Like all the rest of the characters, he has doubts, human weaknesses, he is uncertain, he loved his brother and his first wife, and he lost them both. And he is loyal after his own fashion. All the characters, even those who have nothing in common with us, have frailties and emotions we easily recognise. We might not like them, but we do understand them and can easily put ourselves in their shoes. The description mentions a few of the characters, and there are many more, but I won’t go into too much detail, because as I’ve said, this is a book to be discovered and enjoyed slowly, as it unfolds as we read. If I had to choose one, it would probably be Vincent, a girl who experiences loss at a very early age and tries many different lives for size, but all of the characters have moments of clarity, thoughts, or questions that have made me gasp, nod, or stop and think.
It’s been a long time since I read Station Eleven, but there are nudges towards it in this novel (there is a mention of a virus, and some of the characters of the previous book make brief appearances in this one), and there is no denying the similarities in the way the story is told and in the author’s style of writing. Perhaps the other book is open to a more hopeful and optimistic reading, while this one is more contemplative and personal, but I’d be hard pushed to choose a favourite (and I am convinced that I must reread Station Eleven again).
As usual, I’d recommend checking a sample of the book first, but readers must be aware that the beginning is written in quite a different style to the rest of the book, so keep reading. Ah, and there is a supernatural element in the story (I hesitate to call it magical realism, as it is a very specific and it makes perfect sense), in case you’re wondering.
It’s particularly difficult to choose a few quotes, but I’ll try:
“You know what I’ve learned about money? I was trying to figure out why my life felt more or less the same in Singapore as it did in London, and that’s when I realized that money is its own country.”
“What kept her in the kingdom was the previously unimaginable condition of not having to think about money, because that’s what money gives you: the freedom to stop thinking about money. If you’ve never been without, then you won’t understand the profundity of this, how absolutely this changes your life.”
“If another memo could possibly be sent out, this one specific to smokers: You cannot be both an unwashed bohemian and Cary Grant. Your elegant cigarette moves are hopelessly undermined by your undershirt and your dirty hair. The combination is not particularly interesting.”
“It’s possible to both know and not know something.”
A great novel that looks at truth, reality, identity, the tales and lies we tell ourselves, the nature of memory, and makes us question our priorities. Beautifully written, structurally fascinating and with engaging characters, I recommend it to lovers of literary fiction who don’t mind investing some time in a story and also, of course, to fans of the author.
Like Station Eleven, Mandel takes us into a deep dive into several characters lives but centered around one devastating event: a Ponzi scheme. Jumping between past, present and future she shows us how everyone got to where they were and how the fraud impacted them well into the future. All in a beautifully written story.
My initial reaction was 4 or 4.5 stars. The writing is just as strong as in Station Eleven, but the subject of this story didn’t grab me the way Mandel’s previous novel did.
Two things I really enjoyed:
1. Some characters from Station Eleven appear in this novel, accompanied by musings about different possible worlds in which a deadly flu variant does or does not wipe out almost everyone on Earth. Because isn’t that what storytelling is all about: imagining how our world might be slightly different and the consequences of those small variations?
2. Each character in The Glass Hotel has at least one moral failure that leads them down their path in the novel. Some, like Jonathan Alkaitis’s desire to impress his investors, are major, others less so. But the novel as a whole is a compelling illustration of how we can all fail to live up to our moral standards and the consequences of those failures.
On further reflection, I can’t help thinking about this book days after finishing it. 5 stars.
Curiously I have been to all these locations, even the ones on north Vancouver Island, but sadly only as a common man.
I am still not sure if I liked this book or not. I finished so I guess I was entertained. It lacked something for me. I would not tell someone not to read it but I wouldn’t suggest it either.
I went into this book thinking it was a horror novel; a ghost story, and while there are ghosts within these pages, they neither inform the story nor do they push it forward until the very end. It’s very well-written and I did stick with it all the way through and will admit most of my disappointment with it comes from my inaccurate expectations of what it would be about, which is on me, not Ms Mandel. This is a somewhat tragic story of a brother and sister and their grasping climb to what they assume will be happily ever after. Never has the expression “be careful what you wish for” ever felt more true. I’m sure others would rate this book higher than I have, but it’s just not my cup of tea.
well worth reading
I read this book straight through in one sitting. It is the tale of Vincent, a young beautiful bartender at a hotel in a remote area of Vancouver, BC. Her older brother Paul, a recovering drug addict, also works at the hotel. The Hotel Caiette, is owned by Jonathan Alkaitis, a wealthy investor. One night, a sinister message is etched into the glass window of the hotel. This changes several lives. Paul quits the hotel, Vincent and Jonathan get together, and Ella Kapersky-Jonathan’s enemy-continues to watch him.
This is a well-written book on how trusting a person, when things look too good to be true, will ultimately destroy you.
Thought book weird at first, but then really got into the plot and characters. Based on Ponzi Scheme (aka Bernie Madoff), but much more. Cleverly written. Really enjoyed this book and highly recommend.
I was prepared for the modern approach to fiction, a non-linear plot, abrupt shifts in time and location without warning, being confused now and then. But I am usually irritated by these tricks. I loved the pacing and mood of this book. When time, place and even the character referred to only as she or he suddenly changed–without even a new chapter heading–I knew within a sentence where, what, and who was being described. I don’t even know how the author achieved this. Also, intimacy without embarrassment. Truly masterful.
Not worth the time.
shows the sustainability of people
I did not enjoying this book.
A well woven story.
Horrible book. Nothing to it.
You’re either going to love the shifting time frames and palette of people in this story or not.
Station Eleven is one of my favorite books of the past decade, and this follow up novel has a similar meandering and haunting quality to it. St. John Mandel knows her way around a spider web of a tale. After I read it the first time, I found myself flipping back to different passages, pieces settling in where they didn’t land the first time.
The Glass Hotel is one of those books that is hard to describe….even the jacket copy falls short of capturing its essence. If I had a gun to my head I’d say it’s about two half siblings and the players that weave into their lives, crossing in and out with different impacts. There are plenty of characters to wrap your head around in this story and St. John Mandel doesn’t spend a lot of time with most of them, but with this book it didn’t matter. It’s very much about the sum of the thing, not the individual pieces.
I love books like this. Strange and wonderful for reasons I can’t really pinpoint. I’ll read anything she writes. Two thumbs up.