The Glass Hotel

August 7, 2023 • Tags: fiction, canadian, reading

Author: Emily St. John Mandel

Vincent is a bartender at the Glass Hotel, or as it’s first called, Hotel Caiette. It’s a five-star lodging on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island. On the night she meets Alkaitis, a hooded figure scrawls a message on the lobby’s glass wall. It reads “Why don’t you swallow broken glass?”

Alkaitis’s billion-dollar hedge fund empire is nothing more than smoke and mirrors. When his scheme collapses, it obliterates countless fortunes and devastates lives (like a Madoffexternal link figure). Vincent, who had been posing as Jonathan’s wife, walks away into the night.

Someone hires a victim of the fraud to investigate a strange occurrence. A woman has seemingly vanished from the deck of a container ship between ports of call.   We visit campgrounds for the near-homeless, underground electronica clubs, luxury hotels, and life in a federal prison.

The Glass Hotel is a captivating portrait of greed and guilt. The ghost of unintended consequences is omnipresent, as is the infinite ways we search for meaning in our lives.

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