This is a difficult novel to review. Not because I didn’t like it, on the contrary, because I know that I can’t really do it justice. Perhaps it’s one of those novels that you need to reflect on for a few weeks before talking about, to metaphorically step back from so that you can see the whole more clearly.

The Glass Hotel is vast in it’s scope and yet elegantly simple. The writing is superb, almost mesmerising at times as there is a strangely dream-like quality. There are some beautiful lines; I don’t think that I have ever made so many highlights on my Kindle. Not what you would expect for a book centered around the 2008 financial crash. Please don’t be put off by that, this story is about so much more.

All of the characters, large or small, seem finely drawn and tangible. We encounter many of them over the course of several decades, dipping into their lives both at pivotal events or moments of reflection and ennui. Many of the characters are consumed with alternate histories, imagined conversations that they will never get to take part in, or are visited by ghosts from their past. Once you finish this book you too feel slightly dazed and suspended in an illusory world alongside them.

Thank you to NetGalley and to the publishers for a copy of this book in return for an honest review.

The Glass Hotel is written just as beautifully as Emily St John Mandel’s other work. The characters grip you as the story develops and you gain a greater understanding of how all the complexities are intertwined and how the actions of one person can have different consequences to a multitude of people.

An interesting read giving an insight to both sides of extreme financial fraud. Many varied characters are brought to life throughout the story. I did find the introduction of ghosts rather disconcerting.

I wish to thank Emily St. John Mandel, Pan Macmillan and NetGalley for the advanced copy of The Glass Hotel in exchange for an honest review.

This is the first book I’ve read by Emily St. John Mandel, it’s written with skill, another talented writer I will follow with the intention to read Station Eleven next.

This story is written from alternate viewpoints intertwining over different times. Vincent is the principal character; we follow her life from a young age when her mother disappears in a mysterious canoeing incident until Vincent’s disappearance from a ship many years later. There is mystery in the story and there’s ghosts, it isn’t a ghost story nor overly paranormal. Vincent’s half-brother Paul plays a role in Vincent’s early life; they attend school together and work together at the Hotel Caiette in remote Canadian. Incidents involving graffiti occur in both locations and connect the characters. The hotel is owned by Jonathan Alkaitis, an investor who becomes Vincent’s loveless partner.

Many of the characters in the story are people who have invested in Jonathan’s scheme. These characters are beautifully developed and very likeable. I felt great empathy, such realistic people. I’d definitely recommend this to anyone who enjoys contemporary literary fiction.

I really enjoyed this clever, absorbing book from Emily St. John Mandel. More than enjoyed it - this is a book not just to read, but to drink, a book to immerse yourself in.

The Glass Hotel is bookended (slight pain intended, obviously) by two disappearances - in 1994, that of young Vincent's mother, when she sets out in her canoe one day from her home in a remote part of Vancouver Island and never returns - and in 2018, that of Vincent herself, falling from a containers ship off the coast of Mauritania. Both events are mysterious, both case a shadow.

Between the two deaths, St. John Mandel weaves a detailed and even intricate story, following not only Vincent's life but that of her addict half-brother, Paul, her future husband, financier Jonathan Alkaitis ('He carried himself with the tedious confidence of all people with money'), shipping executive Leon Prevant and many, many others. I particularly enjoy the way that she makes whichever character she is following so vivid, real and interesting - whether or not they are part of the main story. So for example, we hear about Alkaitis' artist older brother, Lucas, who died of an overdose decades before but was painted by Olivia in the Sixties. Olivia later invests her modest savings in one of Alkaitis's funds and acts, to a degree, as the personification of the many individuals who lose money this way. Yet beyond this, St. John Mandel gives us beautifully realised scenes of Olivia with Lucas, a passing encounter involving her and Vincent, and indeed a whole life in miniature for Olivia which makes her concrete and fascinating (and makes us care about what will become of her). Similarly, in St John Mandel's hands, anecdotes such as that involving Leon's wife Marie and her psychic friend, rather than detracting fro the pace of the novel or confusing the story, blaze with life and interest.

She does the same throughout the book - I particularly enjoyed reading about Walter ('There's such happiness in a successful escape') the night manager at the Hotel Caiette, the Glass Hotel, located in that same remote community where Vincent grew up. Walter's life before and after the central events of the story is given, and, like all of this book, it's riveting despite being - or because it is? - so ordinary. Walter has a small but pivotal role in the book because he is present on the night when a man (or woman) whose face is covered by a hoodie scrawls graffiti on the window of the hotel: 'Why don’t you swallow broken glass'. Is it a random act of vandalism or a targeted message? If a message, for whom?

That evening, the hotel will see several of the key playerss in this story. Paul is working there, as are Vincent, her schoolfriend Melissa and the recently widowed Alkaitis (Vincent will soon give up her job, after she meets Alkaitis). These meetings, and that message, resound through the book, seen by different characters and from different perspectives (Paul's conversation with his therapist decades later, Alkaitis's life in prison some years earlier, Vincent's future lives). The mystery of what it means, who did it and why hangs over the first part of the book: in time it seems to recede as we get up-close descriptions of subsequent events, and then at the end, we return to it with more knowledge.

Those alternate viewpoints are more than different individual perspectives. A great deal of the punch in this book comes from its exploring the different worlds that might be possible if this of that had happened differently. We're given an early glimpse of that through something terrible that Paul does and for which, it seems, he never truly feels any regret, except for the consequences to himself: there's always a sense with him after that that he is trying to live a life where that thing, and those consequences, never happened. (I didn't like Paul). Similarly, Jonathan Alkaitis accepts on one level that he has done wrong but still feels he shouldn't be punished and increasingly constructs a 'counter life', an alternate life, or lives, for himself, whether either he committed no crime, or didn't get caught, or fled in time, which over time becomes more and more real. Vincent finds her life with Jonathan so disorienting that 'she often found herself thinking about variations ion reality... she was struck sometimes by a truly unsettling sense that there were other versions of her life being lived without her, other Vincents engaged in different events'

Audaciously, St. John Mandel gives this sense of teeming other realities even more resonance by citing the events of her last book, Station Eleven. In The Glass Hotel, the 'Georgia Flu' is a thing but it has not become an existential threat. Imagine, one of our characters muses, if that happened? A reality in which 'the terrifying new swine flu in the Republic of Georgia hadn't been swiftly contained', in which it 'blossomed into an unstoppable pandemic and civilisation collapsed'.

That will not happen. We are given one vignette established to be twenty years or so in the future, and the world still has cocktail parties. Still, that whole world, those events, are implied in a moment - of course given even greater heft in our Covid-19 world which St John. Mandel couldn't have expected - all, for me, immediately making this story richer, deeper. (Once you notice this, you begin to spot other allusions. For example, at a meeting of shipping executives the strategy is settled on of forming the 'Ghost Fleet' of unneeded freighters, at anchor off the cost of Malaysia, that also features in Station Eleven.)

In keeping with this openness to alternate viewpoints, alternate realities, the book speculates to itself about facts, rather in the manner of a court of law ('she was almost at the end of her shift when he walked in, which places the time of the meeting at somewhere around five or five thirty in the morning') with parts of it being given in the style of testimony. With Jonathan in prison, there has been a trial: at times he is giving his side of things to a journalist, at others the voice of the novel is a 'we' who speculated about events as well as giving a particular, self-serving viewpoint.

Related to the alternative viewpoints theme, another idea which is explored through the book is that of different worlds, overlapping (or not) occupied by different characters. Paul and Walter have both lived in Toronto but 'Paul's Toronto was younger, more anarchic, a Toronto that danced to the beat of music that Walter neither liked nor understood'. In Alkaitis's prison, these are referred to as 'cars' and there is one of people who will never be released, one of New Yorkers, and so forth. Elsewhere, we have the Kingdom of Money, which Vincent inhabits for a time, when she is with Alkaitis, and then has to leave. There is the Shadow Country, where the poor live - not just those with little or no money, but those who've cut adrift from the formal economy, travelling from seasonal job to season job in a recreational vehicle or hitching from truck-stop to truck-stop with the risks that entails. There are the ships' crews, people who have no permanent address on land anymore and, at the end of the book, there's Walter, living alone in the splendour of an empty hotel.

The hotel itself plays several roles in the story. Apart from bringing some of the main characters together, it represents, I think, a performance, a sort of con trick, that is repeated at different levels by different people through this book.The place makes no money. Built in a place so remote that it can only be reached by boat, it attracts the rich, those who want to experience the wilderness without its dangers or discomforts (again, overlapping worlds). It stands only so long as its owner, Alkaitis. He, in turn, stands only so long as everyone chooses to believe that he's not engaged in a massive financial fraud. It is, as one of his associates later claims, possible both to know something and not to know it at the same time. The hotel is both a massive white elephant and a much patronised and popular destination.

The writing in this book is simply gorgeous. St John Mandel has such an ability to convey character, whether it's an external perspective on someone we are seeing for the first time or a new wrinkle or quirk in a familiar figure revealed by an interaction (Vincent's decision, on meeting someone, not to be 'one of those exhaustingly mysterious people whom no one wants to talk to because they can't open their mouths without hinting at dark secrets that they can't quite bring themselves to reveal'). She has a knack for language and for the absurd or distinctive moments of life (a 'meeting that had outlived its natural lifespan but refused to die', someone 'disappearing into her phone', 'Harvey took the desk chair, Joelle sat ion the sofa, and they shredded evidence together. It was almost pleasant.') St John Mandel is also, in light of "recent events", right on the nose in so many places: '"There's something almost tedious about disaster," Miranda said. "...at first it's all dramatic... but then that keeps happening, it just keeps collapsing, and at a certain point..."'

I'd say this book has it all. It's so good I didn't want it to end, I just wanted to keep meeting these characters, exploring more realities, seeing them look backwards and forwards at what had been going on. I know I will return to it, because there is so much here.

Strongly recommended.

Station Eleven was my first read by Emily St. John Mandel and while my enjoyment of that book wasn’t so great at the time, that story has stuck with me in the intervening years, and I have been unable to forget it.

When this one came along on my NetGalley dashboard, I was instantly intrigued by the premise but also wary of my previous experience with St. John Mandel’s work.

Turns out I needn’t have worried.

This book was infinitely murkier, more enjoyable, and had a certain quality, an air of the offbeat.

The narrative was all over the place, forwards, backwards, third and first person, but it works. I found it to be reminiscent of Markus Zusak’s Bridge of Clay, not in story as they are completely different books, but in the way that the story was told. A chronicling of sorts, without paying attention to those pesky lineal timeframes.

It is at once a story of greed, karma, and doing whatever it takes to survive, while simultaneously highlighting every facet of humanity: the good, the bad, and the ugly, and our connectedness to each and every one.

Thank you Emily St. John Mandel, Pan Macmillan Australia, and NetGalley for an arc of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Having previously read Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandell I was really looking forward to reading more of this author’s work. This was nothing like Station Eleven but having said that I still really enjoyed this book and loved the atmospheric writing style of this author.

I would generally have little interest in the storyline as it centred around a financial collapse which I have little knowledge about and I have to admit that this is not a subject that I am overly enthralled with, however I enjoyed this book due to the haunting, atmospheric setting and the way that the story enfolded as we were drawn into each characters life kept me engaged throughout the book.

I loved the character of Vincent. She was a free spirit and a law unto herself. Losing her mother at a young age, she drifted through life before finding herself as a bartender at the luxurious and remote Hotel Caiette. A hotel cut off from the world and the only access, a boat trip from the mainland to the little old Pier. Wealthy businessmen used this as a place to escape the world and when Johnathon came to stay she had no idea that she would fall into the world of the wealthy and go on for a short while to be able to afford everything that she could ever imagine. She soon learnt that these luxuries came at a price.

This was not a book I could totally relax with as it did demand a fairly high level of concentration to follow the script and it wasn’t a book that I could read for a long period of time as I needed to take regular breaks to digest the information that had been provided however all in all I did enjoy this book and the authors writing and descriptive setting was outstanding.

This is a very difficult book to review - I read most of it not really understanding what was going on - often confused - and having finished it I had to read the first couple of pages again to make things clearer as I just could not remember where it started. Set over a period of 15 - 20 years the action is not presented sequentially which added to my confusion. I am glad I persevered because it was only towards the end that I understood what the author was presenting, very cleverly, with a main theme of a financial scam and how it impacted on the perpetrators and the victims (if victims they really were). Remember - if a deal sounds too good to be true - it probably isn't a good deal!!
The reason I continued to read this novel is because it was so well written which made it all worth while.
Three and a half stars for me!
Many thanks to Netgalley/Emily St. John Mandel/Pan Macmillan for a digital copy of this title. All opinions expressed are my own.

I love Mandel's writing, so I enjoyed this one too. It was really interesting, and unique. It was a bit hard ot get in, but gripped me eventually.

Thanks a lot to NG and the publisher for this copy.

I really struggled to get into this book but by the end felt it had completely redeemed itself.

There are so many characters in The Glass Hotel and while it was really interesting, I couldn't pick a favourite character or a favourite story line. There's so much interwoven in all of this book that I felt quite lost reading it and struggled to see the point of it and where it was going.

BUT, that's not to say it's not a good book, because it is. It's obviously well written and fantastically planned and constructed to intersperse the different characters and relationships across time, globe, parallel universes and paranormal plains. There is just so much in there that it really needs some serious time and concentration to keep up. Or maybe just a reader with a better concentration span and focus than me! (I blame a combination of multiple almost-due eARCs, working from home and homeschooling!)

The ending was a brilliant summary of what happened to everyone and I only wish I'd been able to keep up with the story better while I was reading it. The ending almost pushed this to a 4 star book for me but I just couldn't get over my struggle to follow the vast majority of the main part of the book unfortunately.

An extremely well written, planned and paced book that I found frustratingly enjoyable but confusing. I didn't for a moment consider a DNF with this book - I just wanted to understand it better. And by the end, I did.

Thank you to NetGalley, Emily St. John Mandel and Pan Macmillan for the eARC in exchange for an honest review.

After Station Eleven, I would read Emily St. John Mandel's take on, like, a phone book. The Glass Hotel follows a mix of people: Vincent, the bartender at the remote Hotel Caiette; Jonathan, owner of the hotel and king of finance; Paul, the half brother running from his own demons and who writes menacing note on the hotel's window; Leon, a shipping exec who is shaken after seeing the note.

The Glass Hotel is like watching through mist, across settings, reality and unreality, the wilderness, the height of Manhattan elite. Told in fragments, flashbacks, days and decades apart, tied through ponzi schemes, mysterious disappearances and a ripple effect tying everyone to that remote hotel.

A dreamlike read on the ghosts of their respective pasts, slowly unfurling. Liked it a lot. Brilliant writer. Can confirm would still read her take on a phone book.

Vincent is the child of her father’s infidelity, leaving her with a strange relationship with her half-brother, Paul. The pair’s lives take very different turns, but again and again crossing paths. Drug addiction, stolen artwork, sham marriage, fame, ponzi schemes and the financial crash – all of these and more weave through this tale. And the Glass Hotel itself, in glorious isolation in the wilds of Canada.

I’ve been meaning to read the much-lauded Station Eleven for the longest time, and perhaps should have taken more care to read the blurb on this one before jumping at the request! Which isn’t to say that it’s not a good read – in fact, it’s brilliantly written with such a skill with words – but to be honest I found it all a bit too ‘literary fiction’ for my tastes. I prefer stronger plots rather than haunting imagery. Still, I found it a bit reminiscent of Margaret Atwood, which is no faint praise!

Vincent is the main character, mostly, although the story goes back and forth both in time and between her and other characters impacted by some of the same events. It was fascinating, seeing ripples spreading out from incidents large and small.

A large chunk of the narrative involves a thinly disguised version of Bernie Madden’s ponzi scheme and the global financial crash. I suppose I have more interest than most in such things (I worked in finance, albeit a tech side, during those events), but it’s still not quite what I was expecting. I think I would rather have spent more time understanding Vincent, or even Paul (not that I found him likeable). Or, actually, something that gave the amazing ‘Glass Hotel’ more reason for being the title.

Overall: I’m glad I read this, but not my preferred genre. If you like lit-fic more than I do, this seems like a stonkingly well-written slice of it!

Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven imagined a pandemic and its aftermath, asking what could endure and what we would value, if we survived. It was such an intricate and sensitive book it was always going to be a hard act to follow.

In The Glass Hotel Mandel takes on the financial crisis of 2008. The story revolves around a Bernie Madoff-type Ponzi scheme, which robs many investors of their life savings. (She says in the afterword to the novel that she drew on Madoff’s story for the details of the scheme, but not the character of its creator, Jonathan Alkaitis).

The story is not told in a linear fashion but spins out from Alkaitis drawing on several different characters who are tangentially connected to him – investors, workers, friends, lovers. It begins with two 1990s slackers, Vincent and her half-brother Paul, who are drifting after college and both end up working at the glass hotel of the title, which is owned by Alkaitis.

The narrative goes some way to explaining his charisma and the complexities of a man who was deceiving himself as well as all those around him. He is not an obvious showman but appears empathetic to those he draws in. There is one scene where he persuades a shipping executive to invest by professing fascination with his work, and showing an understanding of the complexity of the world’s supply chains which the man finds gratifying.

The motif of the shipping lines, linking separate lives across the globe, mirrors the story with its disconnected characters, although The Glass Hotel doesn’t go so far as to consider the broader fallout of the crisis, confining itself largely to those directly connected to Alkaitis. (Of course the shipping lines are newly fascinating to us all, now the problems of logistics and procurement and international supply chains are no longer a niche technical issue but are daily in the headlines.)

The writing was good, with some nice observations on the life of the rich, and it was an enjoyable read at the time, but when I got to the end I wondered what it had all been for. It didn’t have the pace and energy or detail of a financial thriller but nor did it give me the feeling of absorption I’d want from a literary novel. I didn’t come away thinking I’d learnt anything new, or grappled with any big ideas, or become engaged in the story.

I wanted to love this book the way I loved Station Eleven but I have to admit I was underwhelmed.

I was excited to get the ARC of The Glass Hotel after really enjoying Emily St John. Mandel’s previous book ‘Station Eleven’. The Glass Hotel is an odd story and not one that sadly I think works. The plot centres around a man that gets sentenced to a life in prison for a Ponzi scheme and the impact of that on his family and colleagues. It takes about 60% of the book to get to that point though and I was honestly confused about the plot up until that point which isn’t a great start to a novel!

I think the main problem is the way Mandel chooses to tell the story. We start by getting to know Paul - a drug addict who has made a lot of mistakes in his life. We are with him for quite a few chapters, getting to know him and his history and then we never really see him again until the end – it felt a bit of a waste. We then move on to a man owning a random hotel, then Paul’s sister, her husband Jonathan, a random man in shipping, an old painter, some colleagues, a man who works at sea… It just felt too much without really going anywhere. I understand that they are all linked to the scheme and to each other which is quite a clever device – side characters in one story then become more integral in others but to be honest I didn’t really feel anything for any of them. The constant leaps of perspective happened too often for us to actually understand why we had been given an insight into that perspective in the first place. We only get to know each character after they’ve invested and it’s all gone wrong – which doesn’t really give us an insight into their personality or make us empathise with them before the scheme ruined their life. If we had perhaps gotten to know Jonathan before he started the scheme for example, or the reasons why some of them chose to invest to start with, we would have perhaps felt empathy with at least some of the characters. I think the fact this is actually inspired by true events makes me even sadder as the book could have been a really interesting look at the real events and psychology of the people involved and yet just ended up as a mess.

As well as having confusion of the main plot there was also a kind of side plot about ghosts which didn’t really make much sense. I guess it was to portray certain character’s guilt but at times characters saw ghosts of people that they didn’t even know had died. For a plot that’s supposed to be based on a real-life scheme the break into a paranormal seemed a bizarre choice. I also really didn’t understand the hotel storyline and the importance of the graffiti on the window either.

Overall, I was really disappointed with The Glass Hotel – it’s a mess of a plot and too many characters that the reader cares nothing for. Thank you to NetGalley & Pan Macmillan – Picador for the chance to read the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

It's the first story I read by this author and I fell in love with her style of writing and storytelling.
It's an enthralling and entertaining book that kept me hooked making me turn pages as fast as I could.
The author makes a great job in mixing genres and developing interesting and fleshed characters.
The plot flows and this is a page turner.
I will surely read other books by this author.
A brilliant story, highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

In 2014, Emily St John Mandel came out with what is still one of the best post-apocalyptic tales in Station Eleven. The key to that novel was not the pandemic itself but the human response, and the exploration of the actions of her diverse cast in the new world in which they find themselves. Mandel gives a couple of nods if Station Eleven in her latest book The Glass Hotel. And while The Glass Hotel is more rooted in real events, she takes a similarly diverse range of characters and charts their lives and their reactions as their world shifts around them.
The framing device for The Glass Hotel is woman, Vincent, falling over the side of a ship. The story will circle back to this event and its aftermath as the narrative jumps through and around time. The driving event of the action starts in 2003 - a piece of graffiti scrawled with an acid pen on glass at a ritzy hotel set on its own, a boat ride from any civilization on Vancouver Island. The hotel is owned by an investor called Alkaidis and it is after this incident that he meets bartender Vincent bar and takes her away to his world. After this Vincent moves into the “world of money”, a completely different life, inhabited by completely different people. That is until it turns out that her world is built on a lie, a Ponzi-scheme run by Alkaidis which in the Global Financial Crisis takes him down and all of his investors with him.
Much like Station Eleven was not really about a post-apocalyptic world, The Glass Hotel is not about the global financial crisis. But in both cases, Mandel uses the external events to explore deeper themes. In The Glass Hotel, Mandel is exploring the lives of the 1% and the extreme inequities created by money. But she also explores the ideas of lives lived and not lived, of whether people take the opportunities presented to them and what they make of those. When Alkaidis ends up in prison, he builds a fantasy world for himself in which he gets away with his scheme and flees to Dubai. Meanwhile, Vincent’s brother Paul, whose traumatic story opens the book, takes his opportunity, builds on that experience and finds some success.
If anything, there are too many characters in The Glass Hotel. While Vincent could be considered the main character, she is often offstage while a host of other characters take over the narration. But it is the chorus of multiple characters in this book that brings home the points that Mandel is trying to make. And while many of these characters appear briefly they are deftly sketched.
It has been a long wait since Station Eleven for a follow up and Mandel does not disappoint. The global financial crisis is the perfect vehicle for her to continue to explore how people respond when their world collapses around them. Mandel’s lucid prose and razor sharp characters combine to effectively explore this era and its aftermath but also expose deeper truths about the human condition.

Calling all Station Eleven fans, she has written a newbie, The Glass Hotel and it's out on Kindle on 30 April. Bit of a longer wait for the hardback, with it published on 6 August.

Thanks for the early copy via Netgalley. I enjoyed buddy reading with this @wearethecuriousbookclub.

So, here's what the book is about 👇

Vincent is the beautiful bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star glass-and-cedar palace on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island. New York financier Jonathan Alkaitis owns the hotel. When he passes Vincent his card with a tip, it’s the beginning of their life together. That same day, 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 for a company called Neptune-Avramidis, sees the note from the hotel bar and is shaken to his core. Thirteen years later Vincent mysteriously disappears from the deck of a Neptune-Avramidis ship.

Weaving together the lives of these characters, Emily St. John Mandel's The Glass Hotel moves between the ship, the towers of Manhattan, and the wilderness of remote British Columbia, painting a breathtaking picture of greed and guilt, fantasy and delusion, art and the ghosts of our pasts.

And some of my thoughts:

Station Eleven was one of my fave reads from last year, with a beautiful hope about humanity, and the redemptive powers of the arts. It's also a book that I make reference to often as we are living through the COVID 19 Pandemic.

The Glass Hotel feels like it's mirror opposite though. A reflection of humanity at its worst. Without filter, flaws visible for all to see, but written beautifully.

I was never going to like the New York financier, responsible for a Ponzi scheme resulting in people losing their lives savings. Acting in unconscionable ways, while colleagues and ruthless investors turned a blind eye. That the corporate shipping magnates actions wouldn't fill me with understanding or empathy. Or the brother who uses his talented sister to further his own career.
The novel is filled with unlikable characters, manipulating and using other people for their own gain, the underlying message extolling the virtues of a simpler life.
.

The Glass Hotel, by Emily St John Mandel is a story of wealth and corruption told from the perspective of those whose paths crossed at the Glass Hotel.

Goodreads Synopsis: From the award-winning author of Station Eleven, a captivating novel of money, beauty, white-collar crime, ghosts, and moral compromise in which a woman disappears from a container ship off the coast of Mauritania and a massive Ponzi scheme implodes in New York, dragging countless fortunes with it.

Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star glass and cedar palace on an island in British Columbia. Jonathan Alkaitis works in finance and owns the hotel. When he passes Vincent his card with a tip, it’s the beginning of their life together. That same day, Vincent’s half-brother, Paul, scrawls a note on the windowed wall of the hotel: “Why don’t you swallow broken glass.” Leon Prevant, a shipping executive for a company called Neptune-Avramidis, sees the note from the hotel bar and is shaken to his core. Thirteen years later Vincent mysteriously disappears from the deck of a Neptune-Avramidis ship. Weaving together the lives of these characters, The Glass Hotel moves between the ship, the skyscrapers of Manhattan, and the wilderness of northern Vancouver Island, painting a breath-taking picture of greed and guilt, fantasy and delusion, art and the ghosts of our pasts.

The Glass Hotel, by Emily St John Mandel is a beautifully written story. She is, undoubtedly, a phenomenal writer, the detail is rich and immersive and it creates a vivid and beautiful picture. The writing is also evocative and easily creates the desired atmosphere, usually a little tense and mysterious in this book. The author creates a wonderful sense of mystery, tension and guilt throughout this book and flawlessly creates a strong dynamic and unique voices as she jumps between narratives. However, there was too much jumping. The story jumps from character to character and from past to present, it began to feel disjointed for me and at one point you are so far into the current story and the narrative suddenly jumps incredibly far back, it was jarring and pulled me out of the story a little. It is an effective device at times and helps to maintain the tension and mystery that runs through this story, it just became a little overwhelming.

The characters themselves are very interesting and vastly different from one and other. I loved their differences and enjoyed reading about their lives and their own views of the world and their status within it. While I found the characters interesting and complex, I didn’t feel an incredible amount of emotional attachment to any of them, which was unfortunate as they are written very well.

The book is heavily character driven, there isn’t much of an actual plot running through it, which wasn’t a problem as the characters were interesting and dynamic, but there was a core element and that was the Ponzi scheme. It was surprisingly interesting and entertaining to read about the scheme and how it had affected the lives of the wide cast of characters, it was a well written element and very engaging. But, the other element to the story was the mystery or mysteries. The note on the window mystery was fun to try and untangle and when you read on and find out more about it is interesting and ties up a lot of strands that are running through the story.

The other mystery, however, that occurs close to the end is that of Vincent’s disappearance. I thought this was going to be a much bigger part of the book, it felt like there was going to be a lot more of this mystery in this novel, and yet that is not what happens. The disappearance happens incredibly late in the book and is then investigated but ultimately I felt disappointed at how this one played out. It felt like the build-up was irrelevant and how she disappears was underwhelming, I expected something more.

I really enjoyed the cyclical structure and the almost otherworldly narrative the book starts and ends on but overall I felt underwhelmed by this novel. The mystery throughout came to unsatisfying conclusions and the narrative/story was jarring. However, the writing is truly beautiful and the characters were incredibly interesting and both of these were enough that I rated this as an ok read because her writing really makes you want to reach the end of the story.

*I received an eARC of #TheGlassHotel by Emily St John Mandel from #Netgalley #PanMacmillan in exchange for an honest review*

3.5 stars

A fascinating story about wealth and corruption, as one man's fraud ruins the lives of hundreds around him.

Vincent is drifting through life. After losing her mother in a suspected canoeing incident, she finds herself back on her childhood island, working as a bartender at the isolated Caiette Hotel. When Jonathan, the owner of the hotel, offers her a way out, Vincent takes the opportunity and moves to New York with him, entering the foreign world of opulence and excessive wealth, upholding the role of dutiful wife. But although Jonathan's business is successful, the means are not lawful. It's only a matter of time before the world comes crashing around him, his investors, his staff, and Vincent.

There are lots of different parts to this story and it is something I'm still trying to get my head around. Along with switching timelines, we also have numerous character developments and connections that are made clearer as the story progresses. The Ponzi scheme acts as the focal point that connects the majority of characters and this was an interesting exploration of something I knew little about until reading The Glass Hotel.

I really enjoyed the individual character spotlights as it gave insight into the choices they made, how the scheme affected each person, and their reactions when everything was revealed. This was cleverly done and clearly well-researched.

I personally didn't think the story had much of a plot and I was left with a lot of unanswered questions at the end. The storytelling is great and the subject was original but there just wasn't enough that captivated me or urged me to read on.

Thank you to Netgalley for providing me with a free digital copy in exchange for an honest review.

I don't even know where to begin with this one and how to even describe what genre the story is! It's nothing like Station Eleven, which I adored, but it was a fascinating study of characters dealing with dysfunctional families, financial fraud and the alternate reality we often create in our minds to distract us from the path we did take, and what could have been....

The story quite slowly so it did take me a while to get into the book as I was trying to work out the lay of the land so to speak, but once I'd got my head around the relationships and relevance of the hotel then I found it a really absorbing read and at times it reads like a glossy TV drama - I can picture it already being snapped up by a TV company!

The main characters are Vincent and her brother Paul - he took the wrong path as a youngster and loses touch with this sister. After many years and a spell in rehab he gets back in touch with her and the find themselves working at a luxury hotel.... and their worlds begin to spiral in completely different directions once more.

A lot of the book focuses on the financial fraud of Jonathan Alkaitis, whom Vincent is with after meeting him at the hotel, and I did find the fallout of his fraudulent behaviour to be most fascinating -the people he'd conned, how those he worked with dealt with what was facing them, and how Jonathan himself coped with his life in prison, creating a 'counterlife' in his head and avoiding reality altogether.

What I did miss was more of a focus on Vincent and her life - the story goes backwards and forwards in time and gives snapshots of Vincent and this new life that she found herself living in and how she justified her existence and how that sat with her childhood experiences and relationship with her brother and his role in the story, both past and present.

It really shows up the modern world for what it is - how money clouds the judgement of so many - and I did find the whole story fascinating especially seeing how all the different threads linked up towards the end in a really inventive and clever way.