Author(s): Emily St. John Mandel

Fiction | Recommended Fiction | Our Top Reads of 2020

The extraordinary new 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 skyscrapers 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.

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Thirroul recommends...

"I’ve been looking forward to reading a new novel by Emily St. John Mandel for years. Even after reading the blurb, I didn’t really know what it would be about nor did I really care. I’ve simply been excited to see what Mandel does next. It turns out The Glass Hotel is a ghost story, and its conclusion gave me goosebumps. 

The chorus of characters are all in some way connected to a Ponzi scheme which collapsed during the 2008 global financial crisis and upended their lives, and they are also all linked to an isolated hotel perched on the wild coastline of Vancouver Island. The Glass Hotel interrogates morality and fallibility, and demonstrates how we are all corruptible. 

The narrative shifts between characters and locations in a way that will be familiar to existing fans of Mandel, and the novel’s timeline is fluid. The writing is precise and hypnotic. What is most compelling is how Mandel crumbles the borders between reality, memory and imagination. 

In much the same way that novels gift us with the opportunity to live in an alternate reality for a little while, The Glass Hotel’s characters seek solace in dreamlands in which they made different decisions with drastically different outcomes. But guilt and shame and uncertainty are not so easily erased, and so they are haunted by the life they did lead—and the lives they upset in the process."

— Reviewed by our bookseller Kate