A beautifully woven narrative about a diverse group of people who have been affected by a Ponzi scheme run by Jonathan Alkaitis. Richly imagined, atmospheric and melancholy, the story moves back and forth in time, lives before and after Jonathan’s scam was discovered, shifting between reality, alternate reality and memory.

Jonathan, sentenced to several lifetimes in prison, imagines a counterlife, a parallel life where he avoided imprisonment and finds “a creeping sense of unreality, a sense of collapsing borders, reality seeping into the counterlife and the counterlife seeping into memory”. Vincent, a bartender in the hotel of the title, owned by Jonathan, becomes his pretend wife for a time and is whisked off to a life of such luxury that seems unreal, “she was struck sometimes by a truly unsettling sense that there were other versions of her, other Vincents engaged in different events”.

“Money is a country” is a phrase Mandel uses more than once to highlight the greed, the avarice of Jonathan and his associates. When it disappears in a puff of smoke, ordinary people who’ve invested their retirement funds or lifetime savings in Jonathan’s scheme find themselves living in shadowlands, surviving on the margins of society, adrift. One of the bigger investors commits suicide, another suffers a heart attack and dies. Their ghosts shuffle about the prison yard while Jonathan slowly loses his mind. For decades, his investors were impressed with high returns on their investment, it almost seemed too good to be true and it was.

The Glass Hotel is a poignant book and a compelling read. Highly recommended.

My thanks to Netgalley, Pan Macmillan and Picador for the opportunity to read The Glass Hotel.

An atmospheric novel. I enjoyed the variety of different characters and how their lives interlinked. It was well written and easy to follow the moves in time and between characters, with a focus on the intriguing character of Vincent. Set before and after the 2008 financial crisis, I found the details about the world of finance and shipping well described and not too complex. The settings, such as an isolated hotel and a container ship, were really well described with plenty of atmosphere. I found the book quite sad and a little cynical about the world, but I would still recommend it.

This was a book of two halves for me. I enjoyed the first half as we were introduced to the main characters, but felt the pace changed midway through as Jonathan's financial empire began to crumble. There were too many characters imagining what their parallel life would have been. The story took on a nightmarish quality with so many apparitions. I persevered to the end to find out what happened to Vincent.

Traveller twins are brutally snatched from their community but their time as slaves for a local lord is merely the beginning. YA but reads older, origin story of the brides of Dracula. Good, dark, and engrossing

Review
The blurb grabbed me. Jonathan Alkaitis is a billionaire, made rich investing other people’s money. Owner of Hotel Caiette, he meets Vincent (female), a young and beautiful bar tender who soon becomes his second “wife”. Vincent’s brother Paul also works at the hotel.

The story is based on the investments being made into a Ponzi scheme and it all backfires with Jonathan ending up in prison, dreaming about his counterlife.

There are so many great reviews about this book, this is what convinced me to keep reading to the end. I was waiting for something good to happen, but sadly it did not.

The book introduces many characters, alive and then dead as possible ghosts, real or imagined. I think this may have been Jonathan’s conscience and the visits were in his imagination.

I persevered so that I could leave a review, but I would not recommend this book at all. I rate it 1 star 🌟.

Thanks
Thank you to the author and publishers Pan Macmillan Picador for a copy of this ebook in exchange for an independent review.

This is a gentle read that I enjoyed immensely.

This books doesn’t patronise the reader and gives details slowly and not in the most expected way.

The Glass Hotel moves seamlessly between ship, the Manhattan skyline, and the wilderness of British Columbia. It paints a fascinating picture of greed and guilt, whilst also making reference to fantasy and delusion.

I struggled with The Glass Hotel. It flits between characters which don’t develop sufficiently for me to fully immerse into the story. Time also switches around constantly. I found it a rather dark and depressing read sadly, and although I did finish it, it didn’t have the great ending for me that others mention.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.

A haunting and brilliant study of the choices we make and of what might have been.

When Vincent falls overboard off the coast of Mauritania, her last thoughts are of Paul, her brother. Switch to Toronto, twenty-four years earlier and Paul, a wannabe musician and unwilling finance student, wants to escape a life of substance abuse. He tracks down his sister who finds him a job at the luxury hotel where she works. The hotel, a ‘glass-and-cedar palace,’ at the outer reaches of Vancouver Island, is owned by financier Jonathan Alkaitis. Brought together under the same roof, the characters’ lives converge one evening, then strike off in different trajectories.

The spectrum of directions the characters’ lives might have taken is much the same as that from the light reflecting in water and glinting on crushed glass. At times, the characters' paths cross, aspects of their lives mirror each other. At others, the characters inhabit a counterlife – a shadowland haunted by ghosts from the past – and are cut adrift in a ‘valley between waves’ that is as much out of place as out of time.

Mandel writes assuredly and with confidence in the reader. She deftly folds time and place, enhancing the reading experience with poignant imagery, all intended as a breadcrumb trail to the resolution.

Characterisation is subtle and sparing, and all the better for it.

The Glass Hotel haunted me long after I finished the last page.

Enthralling and thought-provoking.

My thanks to NetGalley and publisher Pan Macmillan for the ARC.

A fascinating story comprised of interlocking stories. It is very well written and is a compelling read.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy.

The glass hotel like all Mendel's books I've read is beautifully written. This is one of those books that doesn't have a classic arc but takes you deep into the lives of Vincent, Paul and Jonathan the main characters. It's a great reflection on why Ponzi schemes go on for so long, and why con artists get away with this sort of crime for so long. Also Vincent is a great character a strong woman that doesn't sell out but gets out. There were a couple of things left unresolved for me but then perhaps we are left to imagine the outcomes ourselves.

Don’t read the blurb before reading ‘The Glass Hotel’.
I didn’t. If I had, I’d have probably been put off by words such as "finance" and "shipping".
Because I didn’t read the blurb, I had no idea what was going on most of the time! Characters flickered in and out across fractured timelines and seemingly disparate events. Yet still, the other-worldly beauty of the writing compelled me to read on.
Hate the thought of a loose plot and “other-worldly beauty”? Me too. But not this time.

This is a brilliant story written in beautiful prose interweaving between times (1990s to the present day) subtly and with great ease so that it makes sense. The plot is about a Ponzi scheme - a multi million dollar investment scam that collapses ruining many people. But it is far more than this. It's about relationships, families, memories and regrets, corruption and morals.
Read this book. It'll keep you thinking for weeks after

Easily my favourite novel of 2019, Emily has surpassed Station 11, which was a pretty damn high bar. Just wonderful on every level, compelling characters, a storyline that sweeps you away. And an ending that lingers.

Station Eleven is one of my favourite books in years so I jumped at the chance to review this. Was it similar? No, not really. Was it brilliant? Yes it was. This is an oddly haunting book about disappearing people, shifting perspectives and how people are linked by absence as much as their presence. I finished this in a day and am still thinking about it, days later. If I described the plot, it would totally fail in every way to do justice to this tricksy, hallucination of a novel.

This is one of those remarkable books that tells you about the lives of different people who are all linked in some way that makes it coherent. Somehow each person’s narrative draws you in and you are interested in everyone and all of their mistakes. There is Paul who seems to have stumbled through life without making any real connection except with drugs, his half sister Vincent who. seems really to have sold her soul and knows it, her fake husband Jonathan who lets so many people down and several others who you feel touched.by. I highly recommend this. Thanks for Netgalley for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

Much like glass, this tale is multi faceted and truly sharp. A fascinating tale which builds tension the entire way! A fantastic story!

The Glass Hotel is in rural Canada, its staff include Vincent and her brother Paul, and one evening a guest realises that someone has written "Why don't you swallow broken glass" on the windows. That guest, who works in shipping, later meets the owner of the hotel, and takes investment advice for him. Years later, he investigates the disappearance of Vincent from a ship his former company owns (on the behest of Miranda, in a cameo from one of my favourite Station Eleven characters, in a world where the flu didn't happen).

The Glass Hotel is really a series of interconnected stories, about what happened to the people who were in the hotel that evening - particularly Vincent and Jonathan Alkaitis, the hotel's owner who is eventually imprisoned. Some characters are more sympathetic than others (Alkaitis is surprisingly sympathetic at times, for a crook), but it's all fascinating.

It isn't a post-apocalyptic story like Station Eleven, but the interwoven multiple narrative structure isn't dissimilar and is equally engaging. Worth reading.

I really struggled with this book. It jumps around a lot and was really hard to get into. The interweaving between characters as well as finance and shipping etc made it a hard read for me.

Emily St.John Mandel follows up the much talked-about Station Eleven, with a meditation on avarice, morality and serendipity.

Fans of Station Eleven may be disappointed to find that The Glass Hotel is less speculative fiction and more speculative financial risks, but there's much to admire here nonetheless.

The story follows the interweaving lives of a handful of characters, most of whom shared time at the titular hotel. The focus of the book changes as the baton is passed between the various characters, so it's tricky to say what the book is "about" but at the certain of the connections is a huge financial scam orchestrated by one of these people.

Mandel writes beautifully and simply. Her characters are layered, flawed and intriguing. She even manages to make the shipping industry exciting. Ish.

There were points in the novel where I felt a little frustrated though. There's a certain detachment to the writing which can make it feel like you are watching the story unfold at a distance without feeling what's really driving some of the characters. And the book cuts away from some main characters just as I felt I was getting to know them and was on the verge of really understanding them. But I suspect this is intentional and that the author doesn't want to spell out motivations, but instead encourages us to consider for ourselves the choices that materialism brings about. Does greed need an explanation, or are we all intrinsically familiar with this impulse?

Another strong novel from a strong voice in contemporary fiction.