The Glass Hotel

Emily St. John Mandel

29 April 2021
9781509882830
320 pages

Synopsis

From the author of Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel is the story of the lives caught up in two very different tragedies: a woman disappearing from a container ship, and a massive Ponzi scheme imploding in New York.

'Terrific' – Sunday Times
'Elegant, haunting' – The Times
'A damn fine novel . . . evocative and immersive' – George R. R. Martin

Vincent is the beautiful bartender at the exclusive Hotel Caiette. When New York financier Jonathan Alkaitis walks into the hotel and hands her his card, it is the beginning of their life together.

That same night, 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, sees the note from the hotel bar and is shaken to his core.

When Alkaitis's investment fund is revealed to be a Ponzi scheme, Leon loses his retirement savings in the fallout, but Vincent seemingly walks away unscathed. Until, a decade later, she disappears from the deck of one of Leon's ships . . .

No one can create beautiful, enmeshed, startlingly clever worlds the way Mandel does
Elegant, haunting . . . a unique rumination on guilt, grief and regret
Elegant . . . beguiling . . . the joys of The Glass Hotel are participatory: piecing together the connections . . . a treasure map ripped to pieces