“There is exquisite lightness in waking each morning with the knowledge that the worst has already happened.”

Emily St. John Mandel’s highly-anticipated follow-up to Station Eleven is a masterpiece of operatic proportions, spanning more than thirty years, and involving a disparate cast of characters impacted by the catastrophic collapse of a financier’s Ponzi scheme.

It opens in December 2018, with Vincent Smith falling overboard from a container ship near the coast of Mauritania, into the annihilating cold of the water below. The narrative then unsnarls backwards, disclosing how the book’s key players are linked by the Hotel Caiette, a five-star architectural triumph on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island — owned by Jonathan Alkaitis, whose fraudulent investment scheme will derail so many lives — and the night a menacing message was scrawled on its primary window: “Why don’t you swallow broken glass.” 

Exploring ghosts, guilt, heartache and corruption, The Glass Hotel is a virtuoso display of overlapping storylines, that bounce backwards and forwards in time, and into a surreal “counterlife,” interweaved via character, theme, and plot. This is genius storytelling by one of my favourite writers.

ISBN: 9781509882816
Format: Trade Paperback
Pub Date: 31/03/2020
Imprint: Picador
Pages: 256
Price: $29.99