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 is running an international Ponzi scheme, moving imaginary sums of money through clients’ accounts. When the financial empire 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, the business of international shipping, …
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 is running an international Ponzi scheme, moving imaginary sums of money through clients’ accounts. When the financial empire 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, the business of international shipping, 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.
Great story, characters, settings & writing. Among other things, I really enjoyed the exploration of liminal spaces, of haunting/being haunted, and of life vs counterlife ... and characters imagining alternate paths unfolding if they had done something different. Also interesting ideas about the different "countries" we inhabit - money, sickness, misfortune, shadow, etc. Now I'm really looking forward to reading Sea of Tranquility.
This book is so beautiful, so insightful, and so sad. This story is a deep-dive into the different worlds that we can often fall into. It's an examination of wealth, poverty, addiction, guilt/shame, stealing to get by, making art for art's sake, making art for ambition's sake, greed, dread, and so many more things.
As someone whose family was significantly impacted by the 2008 financial crisis (and let's be honest, whose wasn't), I found that entering back into the world of watching white collar criminals squirm was like a warm blanket. There are a few scenes in the book where various financial criminals are overtaken by waves of dread and it felt like such a balm to my soul to experience their suffering as a reader and then to remove myself back into the cozy world of my own little reading nook.
The Glass Hotel is not a feel-good book, …
This book is so beautiful, so insightful, and so sad. This story is a deep-dive into the different worlds that we can often fall into. It's an examination of wealth, poverty, addiction, guilt/shame, stealing to get by, making art for art's sake, making art for ambition's sake, greed, dread, and so many more things.
As someone whose family was significantly impacted by the 2008 financial crisis (and let's be honest, whose wasn't), I found that entering back into the world of watching white collar criminals squirm was like a warm blanket. There are a few scenes in the book where various financial criminals are overtaken by waves of dread and it felt like such a balm to my soul to experience their suffering as a reader and then to remove myself back into the cozy world of my own little reading nook.
The Glass Hotel is not a feel-good book, but it's a damn good one.
In one word, I would describe The Glass Hotel as atmospheric. I enjoyed becoming immersed in the world of The Glass Hotel. Yet, the story and the characters did not really hold much emotional strength to me. Part of my disengagement may have been because I hadn't known what a Ponzi scheme was before reading The Glass Hotel. Regardless, I don't think I'll remember this book for a long time. However, I loved Mandel's Station Eleven.
