The New York Times bestselling novel, from the author of Station Eleven.
‘A damn fine novel . . . haunting and evocative and immersive’ George R. R. Martin
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 towers 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.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 320
Imprint: Picador
Publication date: 18/02/2021
Glass Hotel
by Emily St. John Mandel
Review by Alex A
Part of a loose trilogy along with Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility, Glass Hotel is a study of invisible but potent moments of connection, decision and accident, the effects of which radiate through lives.
Written in hypnotic, measured prose, this was a serene and melancholy read. Following a cast of nuanced characters – a bartender on a remote Canadian island, a mogul at the top of a Ponzi scheme, a former drug addict-turned-artist – each chapter serves as a piece of a montage which gradually expands into a sweeping tale of human failings, delusion and impermanence.
Through her evocative and deft writing, this book never felt overly heavy or depressing – her prose paints every scene so delicately that I found myself pausing periodically to fully enjoy certain passages.
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