What a find! I haven't read anything by this author before but I will definitely seek her out in the future.
This story is a bit too complex to make a precis... it concerns a woman Vincent and her half brother Paul whose lives separate and then touch again across decades. Vincent is the heroine and what a survivor she is, a powerful character who can walk into and out of many lives including being a bartender in The Glass Hotel which leads her to a life as ‘wife’ to a wealthy crook, then out to sea where she has her final scene. She is beautiful, clever, brave and enterprising. Also an artist who films the waves.

Its not the story that drew me in but the personality of Vincent and also to a lesser extent of Paul who is lost both in his life and in his morals. He is responsible for the death of another boy, he runs, he hides, he agrees to an act of vandalism just because someone asks him to. He is not an attractive character but he is believable and human.

The story winds its way through a variety of times and places and sometimes I was lost but the eriting is beautiful and there is always a thread to lead you on.

learning about the workings of a Ponzi scheme was an added bonus. Fascinating book and definitely an author I’d recommend.

This is a new author for me, finding a new author is very exciting and I couldn’t wait to start this book!!

The Glass Hotel is on Vancouver Island, only accessible by boat. A luxury 5 star hotel owned by Jonathon Alkatis who works in finance.

When Jonathon passes a card with his tip to Vincent the bartender it’s a new beginning for as his trophy wife, leading to money and entitlement!!

Thirteen years later Vincent disappears off the deck of the Neptune - Avramidis ship. Was it an accident or deliberate!!

This book in set in alternative timelines starting from 1999.

Beautifully written and very addictive. I was fascinated with the Ponzi scheme and never realised how interesting they are.

Will definitely read Station Eleven!!

Thank you for my copy in exchange for a review.

THE GLASS HOTEL – EMILY ST JOHN MANDEL

I read this novel in advance of publication through NetGalley in return for an honest review.

It has to be me.

According to Google, this author has written several novels, been translated into nearly thirty languages and has signed a deal to make one of her books into a film. She must have something that people admire, that makes them want to read her stories. I’m not sure what that something might be.

For me, this book was not only poorly written but boring: unrealistic dialogue that meandered rather than furthered the story, characters that were mere cyphers, and a rambling all-over-the-place style that, frankly, I found beyond tedious. So many conversations and scenes went nowhere: I read them and wondered why they were included. There are many examples I could give, but I don’t want to waste your time reading them or mine for typing them out.

If you are someone who has enjoyed her books in the past – and there must be thousands who have - then I’m guessing you’ll enjoy this. I’m sure one bad review won’t spoil her fan-base.

I have read some brilliant novels through NetGalley that I have happily awarded five stars. But the purpose of an honest review is to give an honest opinion, and this is mine.

A great story. Very intellect and intellectual story regarding money, beauty and crime. Scarily and true

Flawed yet sympathetic characters based or at least inspired by real events - there’s not much not to like in this fast paced story.

Set in Canada it weaves it’s way between high skyscrapers, the boat, and the wilds of British Columbia

Wonderful writing, highly recommended

An enjoyable and different read. I didn’t know what to expect with this one but on the whole it was a decent read. It was exciting and thrilling and had such a great ending.

I liked <i>Station Eleven</i> quite a bit - but for me the author is getting better with age/experience here. There is nothing about this one that didn't come together beautifully here... okay, there are two halves of two different things, but that barely counts.

Telling the story of a half dozen characters over the span of 30ish years, <i>The Glass Hotel</i> has a lot of elements that often put me off: non-chronological storytelling, emo youths with emo histories, addiction storylines, ghost story elements. That being said, seriously, this was really good.

The prose is economical, but the tone is still somehow quite dreamy? How did Mandel do that? Amazing.

The time bouncing isn't done to create arbitrary cliff-hangers for suspense - instead it is in the service of a gorgeous flow to the narrative (fitting considering the books' obsession with bodies of water) - rejoining many characters during their various lives, interactions, reflections, etc. I really enjoyed the level of interconnectedness here; it is present and important without being slavishly done. Not every thread is tied up at the end or tied to another along the way (but the author doesn't leave you hanging on the big ones! Thank goodness!).

Vincent is a fantastic character - smart, pragmatic, tragic but not dismal. I loved her story. She isn't a blank placeholder protagonist, but she's relatable enough to connect you, she's specific, but still somehow probably your everyman character in the novel. As are Walter and Leon, both of whom could have been throw away characters but were instead engaging and I completely bonded with them in a very short narrative time. (I'm ready for the author to just write me a short story/novella on either of them, pleaseandthankyou.) I expected to loathe Jonathan, the Ponzi scheme man, but no, he was also a rich character. Villain, but not. Relatable, but not. Just inscrutable enough, but not written obtusely. I wish there had been a little more wrap up to his story; his future was teased, but not enough to really decide what was happeneing to him.

Paul didn't interest me, sorry. I know he's supposed to be important, but I just didn't care for him and wanted literally anyone else to start talking again everytime he returned to the story.

Also, the ghost story elements didn't totally work for me here. Maybe because the book teased it a little too far beyond metaphor? It wasn't badly done, but I've recently read it done better (<i>The Temple House Vanishing</i>), so it fell a little flat.

There's a lot of meditation here on past and future and sort of <i>the road not taken</i>. The spectre of other lives and futures and pasts haunt all the characters (maybe that's why I didn't think it needed ghosts too?). Those meditations are all done in a way that feels sensitive and specific per character - rather than the characters doing lip service to the philopsophical point. You have all my props for that, Mandel!

Really enjoyed this one, more than I would have anticipated. Lovely when that happens.

My thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for the arc to review.

This is an interestingly structured book that cycles round Paul and Vincent, half-brother and sister, making their way through modern day Canada as best they can. Paul has a heroin problem and wants to compose. Vincent meets a rich guy in a bar and seizes the opportunity.

The point of view shifts, so that you get different perspectives on the same events. Lives are connected by coincidental meetings, by relationships that come and go. The central, awful event is not glamourised, the consequences are shown, directly and indirectly. Nobody survives unscathed.

The Glass Hotel itself is a wonderful setting - paradoxically a place of exposure, and a place of escape.

It's a beautifully written book, the characters felt real, the events entirely believable, and yet touched with myth.

Excellent. I really enjoyed Station 11 and this was very good as well. It follows the lives of a brother and sister through some memorable and different times in their lives. It was cleverly written and thoroughly enjoyable from start to finish

I was very excited to read this. The Glass Hotel is inspired by the Bernie Madoff ponzi scandal. It describes the rise and fall of a multi-million-dollar investment scheme and the impact of that collapse on the both the investors and the perpetrators. I admit, I wanted more of the scheme and less of the surrounding players but the novel still worked.

Like Station Eleven, The Glass Hotel follows the flawed, yet sympathetic characters as their story slides backwards and forwards through time.

The Glass Hotel is about the lies people tell each other and the lies they tell themselves to survive. Their masks and deceptions and greed laid bare.

This is very different from Station Eleven - a book which I adored. This tale is set in the past, present and future - and in particular deals with the unsavoury world of financial scams.

There is a large cast of characters which took me a while to get to grips with. At some point another group of people joined in the story and I was a little confused as to what they were doing there - but hang on in there, as it all becomes apparent. Once we had dispensed with the nitty gritty of the Ponzi scheme I really enjoyed the character development and the hint of other worldliness that danced through their experiences.

The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel is a wonderfully written book weaving in out of the lives of her characters who have all shared an event early on in the book and will later be affected by a future event.
Written in the same style as the stunning Station Eleven, The Glass House takes a short while to settle but eventually becomes worth the wait as the narratives begin to interact with each other.
In my opinion, this book sometimes feels like it is a snapshot of memories and the regrets the characters now have when piecing together these events over time.
Highly recommended.

Anyone who has read Station Eleven or in fact any of the author’s previous novels will know that Mandel writes thoughtful and addictive stories. Her prose doesn’t shout a story at you, it’s far more subtle than that. Instead you’re more likely to be taken through a gentle maze of events that eventually knit together to deliver a gut punch. This book starts with what appears to be a scene of Vincent’s final moments after falling off a ship. One of those thoughts is a wish to see her brother. Quickly the time frame changes and we’re introduced to to Paul, a dropout from the University of Toronto where he was studying finance. Paul’s real interest is music but for reasons that will become apparent later he ended up studying a subject he really had no interest in. Paul, we learn, has a half-sister called Vincent.

The story floats about in both time and place. The time element runs from the early 1990’s to close to the present day and the places are principally British Columbia and Manhattan. When we next come across Vincent and Paul they are both working at a luxury hotel situated at the most northerly tip of Vancouver Island. One night a lone guest spots a disturbing message scrawled on the large glass window of the lounge. Later that same night Vincent, who runs the bar, meets the rich owner of the hotel and a strange deal is struck between the two. We’ll make sense of these two events, but not yet, not for some time.

There are essentially two threads at play: the story of Vincent and of Paul, of their early life and of how their lives play out and then, as the cast expands, the impact of a Ponzi Scheme on its investors as it all goes belly up and their money is lost. Anyone familiar with the notorious Bernie Madoff investment scandal will have a sense of just how totally investors in this type of full-on con can be financially ruined. And interestingly a couple of characters we meet along the way featured in the aforementioned Station Eleven; things turn out differently for Miranda Carroll and Leon Prevant in this book. So what do we have here, a Sliding Doors style set-up in which a very different life for this pair plays out? It’s a quirky element in this intriguing piece.

I love the way the story is put together. After each player is introduced we lose sight of them for a while, only to catch up with them later. Each is effectively and sympathetically drawn and I found myself caring for all of them, even the bad guy at the centre of the fraud. The time shifts are also brilliantly effective and allow the story to play out in a surprising but highly effective way. There are ghosts here too and that’s not something I’m usually accepting of in any tale, but strangely they work here – they provide a linkage and ultimately a wholeness to the story that might not otherwise be there.

This book is due to be published in March 2020, some six months from now and I’m sure it will find many, many admirers. I absolutely loved it. I finished reading it a couple of days ago but it’s taken me a little while to clear my mind and to capture my thoughts on it – in truth, it’s been deeply embedded in my head from the first day I started it.

Inspired by the Bernie Madoff scandal, The Glass Hotel describes the collapse of a multi-million dollar investment scheme and the impact of that collapse on the both the investors and the perpetrators.

The novel shares many of the stylistic features of its predecessor, Station Eleven, including a deconstructed plot, a variety of narrative perspectives, an awareness of the randomness of events coupled with a sense of their connectedness, and a feeling for the poetry of corporate spaces.

The effect is a voice that somehow manages to be on the one hand cool and detached and on the other evocative and poignant. As a result, it's perfect for examining the moral ambiguities of a crime that ruins hundreds of people, driving some of them so suicide, yet one that is carried out by individuals who do not consider themselves to be bad people. It's possible, the financier who sets up the scheme decides, to know something and not to know it at the same time. It's a perspective that is shared to a greater or lesser degree by almost every character in the book.

Clever, elegant and moving, The Glass Hotel is a study in the effortlessness of corruption.

Ohhhhh this is so beautifully written. It's much less plot-driven than Station Eleven (which I also loved) It's more about people: their relationships, their sense of self, of reality and fantasy. I closed it and wanted to start it all over again. Read it.

I so much wanted to write a glowing review of The Glass House. It was beautifully written and quite lyrical in its use of language. However I struggled with the actual story the jumping between characters and storylines was irritating and confusing. The only person of real interest for me was Vincent and as near the beginning we were told of her demise on the boat it slightly ruined the story. Did the reader really need to know about the shredding of paper for pages!

I loved Station Eleven but The Glass House not so much.

I absolutely adored Station Eleven, so rushed to request The Glass Hotel from Netgalley without checking the blurb. Of course, many of my favourite authors are not defined by genre and if I had read any more of St John Mandel's work (something I intend to remedy), I would have known she fits into this category, although her sparse, elegant, almost remote, multiple POV style remains the same as does her ability to move through multiple times and threads with a sense of other worldly strangeness, this is no dystopia.

The Glass House is a book about the identies we construct, the lies we tell ourselves and others, the games we play, the masks we wear, our deceptions, sips that pass in the night, both literally and figuratively. There are multiple POV, some we return to again and again, some just for a while, but all are linked in some way. The book starts with Paul, musician and junkie, who makes a disastrous decision and runs to his half sister, Vincent, for sanctuary. Fast forward and the night manager of a beautiful hotel in a wild part of Vancouver Island (the Glass Hotel of the title) witnesses a disturbing event. Fast forward again and a young woman comtemplates her life as the pampered consort of a billionaire.

Engrossing, meticulously plotted and beautifully written this was a wonderful book, the echoes of which still reverberate through my thoughts and dreams.

My thanks to NetGalley and publisher Pan Macmillan - Picador, for the ARC.
This is the first book I have read by this author, and I am finding it really difficult to decide just how to review it, but here goes.
Initially I was confused and somewhat bemused by the writing style which I thought was a little bit 'crazy', but doggedly determined as I am, I persevered, and gradually began to understand it. Finally, at the end, I can reflect on just what an extraordinarily clever piece of literary work this is.
Written in a style of multiple vignettes - dipping into the lives of a host of characters, across times and situations; all appearing to be isolated until you realise there are connections and their stories become clearer.
Now, to start to explain the characters, their connections, and the consequences of their particular actions, would be a real spoiler - so I won't attempt to.
Suffice it to say that wealth and greed, and the 2008 financial crisis are the lynchpins of this story - "The Kingdom of Money", as described in the book - and how the pursuit of that touched and altered the lives of others. Can anyone really escape their past?

I thought this was fascinating, it's like a jigsaw puzzle where you're only allowed to see random small parts of the picture at any given time, until the author decides to reveal it.

I know this isn't out for months yet but I couldn't resist bumping it to the top of the tbr. Full review to come but this was everything I hoped for. Bear in mind that it's not technically a sequel to Station Eleven or a dystopian novel, but instead a literary novel. Although there are some nods to Station Eleven - two characters make a cameo; there's a hint of the parallel universe theory etc But this has some strong speculative elements and a compelling mystery all written in the author trademark beautiful prose. A stunning novel.

If a reader's only experience of Mandel's writing is her superlative post-pandemic novel, Station Eleven, then I can imagine them feeling disappointed with The Glass Hotel, which has much more in common with her earlier books (particularly Last Night In Montreal). However, given time, it reveals itself to be a gem of a book. Somewhat odd and narratively meandering in the best way, with characters and plots intersecting and nestling within each other like Russian dolls.