The Glass Hotel - by Emily St John Mandel

"The perfect novel ... Freshly mysterious." --The Washington Post

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's billion-dollar business is really nothing more than a game of smoke and mirrors. When his scheme 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, 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.

Look for Emily St. John Mandel's bestselling new novel, Sea of Tranquility!

Review Quotes

"Flawlessly constructed." --The Boston Globe

"Heartbreakingly resonant." --San Francisco Chronicle

"Lyrical, hypnotic." --The Wall Street Journal

"A careful, damning study of the forms of disaster humanity brings down on itself." --Vulture

"A beguiling tale about skewed morals, reckless lives and necessary means of escape." --The Economist

"A wondrously entertaining novel." --Slate

"A master in her prime . . . a marvel of intricacy from beginning to end." --Entertainment Weekly

"Mandel's gift is to weave realism out of extremity. She plants her flag where the ordinary and the astonishing meet. . . . She is our bard of waking up in the wrong time line." --The New Yorker

"Richly satisfying. . . . Deeply imagined, philosophically profound." --The Atlantic

About the Author