The Glass Hotel

January 24, 2023 4:22 PM

Somewhere at sea, a woman goes overboard. Somewhere in New York, a financial fraud comes undone. Somewhere on a remote Canadian island, a window is graffitied. Emily St. John Mandel’s novel, The Glass Hotel, knits together these strands in a story about self-invention, loss, and the ghosts of lives that might have been.

Reviews:
* NPR: Staying At Home? Check Into Emily St. John Mandel's Haunting 'Glass Hotel'
* The New Yorker: “The Glass Hotel” Is a Profound Study of Responsibility in Times of Crisis
* Kirkus: "In luminous prose, Mandel shows how easy it is to become caught in a web of unintended consequences and how disastrous it can be when such fragile bonds shatter under pressure."

Elsewhere on FanFare:
* The Sea of Tranquility, Emily St John Mandel
* Station Eleven

posted by MonkeyToes (5 comments total)

Lovely book. Liked it a lot.
posted by kyrademon at 5:01 PM on January 24, 2023

This was gentle and thoughtful. I liked how The Plot stayed mostly in the background, but not in a frustrating way. It was there as a common thread, but the characters' stories were interesting enough on their own to keep my interest.
posted by Lorc at 1:12 AM on January 25, 2023

I think she's one of the best authors we've got going these days and only wish there was an enormous pile of her work in which to swan dive. I read this in a day and loaned it out and immediately regretted it, and am going to order another copy. I loved this story, the subtle, beautiful callbacks to Station Eleven, and the care with which she writes about the messy tangle created by deep caring and responsibility.
posted by ersatzkat at 9:58 AM on January 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

I thought this was the best of the three books in the sort-of trilogy.
posted by octothorpe at 11:00 AM on January 25, 2023

I randomly checked this book out of the library and loved how I could not figure out where it was going.
posted by acrasis at 9:40 AM on January 28, 2023