i really liked the concept and how it was very rooted in the modern day/near future just with added policing tech. i was invested in the story despite it being fairly slow and low action. the women's position and treatment is infuriating and obviously supposed to make you reflect on what is happening right now. there were a few unfinished storylines that i wish was explored in more depth on though.

No, not for now....and probably not for the future either.

I have not been in the mood for dystopian fiction for a while now, probably something to do with the current political situation. And also with being lectured...

The novel - about a woman being detained for what she dreamt - was a bit too much on the nose for me.

I had the same problem with Prophet Song, so there's clearly an element of personal taste too.

Speculative fiction or a wake up call? The Dream Hotel opens up so many topics for thought and consideration but the over-riding sensation was one of us sleepwalking into a world where everything we do, say, think, or dream are under surveillance. With the very real threat that this can lead to incarceration for crimes as yet uncommitted.

Well paced and very readable with the sense of helplessness, disbelief, anger and frustration bursting from every page.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ – Unsettling, Prophetic, and Utterly Gripping

The Dream Hotel is a tense, deeply unsettling novel that lingers long after the final page. It blends Orwellian dread with the speculative tech paranoia of The Future and Minority Report, offering a haunting warning about blind faith in AI. Sara’s arrest—based purely on a government-calculated Risk Score—feels chillingly plausible in today’s data-driven world.

While the characters aren’t always likeable, they feel painfully real, shaped by a system that values prediction over humanity. The writing is sharp and evocative, pulling no punches in its exploration of surveillance, control, and the blurred lines between safety and oppression.

This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the future of AI and the ethical dilemmas it raises. Unforgettable and timely—just not for the faint of heart.

I'll definetly be picking up more from this author.

The Dream Hotel is a terrifying horror created by the recent anxieties everyone has, from the LA fires, to the dangers of AI. How realistic can AI become before we can no longer distinguish between reality and fake? We may already be there and then coupled with the idea of AI predicting people being dangerous and being able to imprison people who rate as so is ah, not as scifi as it was when I first saw Psycho pass. Excellent book, stunning writing and unsettling to my core.

In this near-future speculative novel, Sara Hussein is stopped at the airport — not for what she did, but for what she might do. Her dreams have been mined for data, and the system decides she’s at high risk of committing a crime. What follows is a claustrophobic, dehumanising fight to prove she’s not a danger, all while navigating a frustrating algorithm-powered system and watching her life fall apart.

The Dream Hotel tackles huge themes: surveillance, social scoring, data bias, and unjust bureaucratic systems. It reminded me of the way hysteria was weaponised against women, except this time, it’s dressed up in AI, dreams, and social scores. It’s deeply unsettling.

I loved the concept, and I genuinely felt the discomfort of Sara’s situation, but I struggled to connect with the characters. At times it felt like the message overshadowed the emotional arc, and the flashback-within-flashback structure took me out of the story. Some plot threads were left hanging too, which I suspect was intentional to heighten the psychological pressure, but I’m a reader who craves closure.

Still, it’s bold and timely. I can absolutely see this working well as a limited series being that it is uncomfortable, sharp, and socially charged. I think it would land harder in a group read or buddy setting, where you can unpack the layers and talk through every aspect.

Have you read this one? Do you think it’s possible to use dreams to work out if someone is dangerous?

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for my copy of the book.

I found the Dream Hotel tense, unsettling and unforgettable. It serves as a cautionary tale of blind faith in new AI technology. Sara is detained for having a high Risk Score, determined by government crime prevention AI, which aims to predict who in society is likely to commit a crime via 24/7, multi-method monitoring, and removes them from society before it can happen.

While themes were similar to Minority Report, The Dream Hotel gave me a similar feeling to The Future by Naomi Alderman, and plenty of nods to Orwell, with each I felt a visceral sense of unease and discomfort the entire way through. The characters weren’t likeable, but they were real. How many of us would be likeable in a dystopian AI nightmare?

I’d highly recommend this to anyone who is interested in AI technology, on any side of the spectrum. And if you enjoy speculative fiction, pick it up now!

What a book and so frightening close to reality and what might become.
The premise of this book around the MFC, Sara Hussein, and the advancement of technology and what could be developed (developing technology that can read the subconscious mind and use it as evidence against you) is terrifying. The thought that someone could invade your privacy and your own thoughts is abhorrent, especially when personal thoughts could be used against you and be misinterpreted. The book challenges readers to think deeply about the 'exciting' advancement of technology and whether it is for better or worse. I feel people are creating something that the human mind hasn't evolved itself ready to handle.

I liked it. It was odd but in a good way. I did think it was going to be more of a dystopian story than it was, but it felt a bit flat there. I suppose my main issue was I wasn't sure what it was tyring to be. A fantasy, yes. But dystopian, horror, thriller? Was it meant to be like The Handmaid's Tale? Did it have a moral or a message? It was perfectly enjoyable and I would recommend it, but it left me a bit confused as I wasn't sure it knew what it was or where it was going.

I wanted to read this because the premise sounded so promising. Unfortunately, it fell flat for me.
It had all the themes that pique my interest, but it was dull. Very much so. The characters were flat, plot development just wasn't interesting enough.

Lalami manages to depict Sara’s journey and her initial run-in with the Customs Officer very convincingly. Then, as she is pulled from the queue for further investigation and finally for incarceration at the retention centre – my stomach twisted.

For this dystopian sci fi tale to work, I needed to be completely on Sara’s side. And I was – having infant twins at home waiting for her return made her continuing imprisonment all the more heartbreaking. Lalami’s description of life within the Centre and the speed at which she needs to acclimatise is gripping and fully pulled me into the story.

I found this a very uncomfortable read – to the extent that there were times when I had to break off and read a chunk of something else before plunging back into it. Lalami’s account of someone who lands on the wrong side of an algorithm designed to monitor people and imprison them before they have an opportunity to commit a future crime is chillingly believable. The tedium and pettiness of the rules are wearing and inhumane. Despite repeatedly being told that they are not prisoners and still have rights – the women detainees are treated as if they are criminals. Sara’s disbelief and growing frustration as the initial twenty-one days she is supposed to be detained stretches ever longer is something I keenly felt.

As the plot develops, we learn that there is another reason why Sara has been detained. Suffering from crippling insomnia after the twins’ birth, she has uploaded a sleep app. Something she is now bitterly regretting… I don’t want to say more, because of the risk of Spoilers – but the glimpses we see of the outside world are also scarily plausible. All in all, this is a cautionary tale of how we should be watching carefully at the direction governments and commerce are moving towards in an effort to make everyday life safer and more profitable. The reason why it hasn’t garnered a ten is that the ending seemed a little flat. That said – I’ve found myself thinking about this one a lot since I completed it and highly recommend it if you want to read a thought-provoking critique of some of officialdom’s current mindset. While I obtained an arc of The Dream Hotel from the publishers via Netgalley, the opinions I have expressed are unbiased and my own.
9/10

I really liked the premise of this, but unfortunately it felt like it lacked something for me. It’s speculative fiction that feels worryingly plausible; a woman travelling home from a conference overseas is pulled in for questioning and she ends up in a detention centre for potential criminals. It turns out that the implant she has had installed to help her sleep better as a new parent of unexpected twins has been tracking her dreams, and has flagged her as a risk to her husband.

On top of capitalist dream-surveillance, there are interesting threads throughout the novel - Sara’s relationship with her husband, their differing ideas of what a marriage looks like, how they approach spending and responsibility; a horrible accident in Sara’s childhood which completely changes the context of the dreams she has been detained for; her racial profiling at airports and the positive use of AI to stop it; the other women at the centre and their backstories; the interesting angle of the not-prison officers and their motivations - but these are kind of overshadowed by the *AI JUSTICE IS BAD* and by the end, many of the threads were left hanging.

I think this will pop up in “if you liked Black Mirror, you’ll love this…”, and it is a solid concept for that genre of dystopian/speculative fiction, but I wanted more from it.

Thank you NetGalley and Bloomsbury Publishing for this eCopy to review

When I first picked up The Dream Hotel, I was intrigued by its premise. The story is set in a near future where even our dreams are under surveillance. Sara Hussein, finds herself detained by the Risk Assessment Administration (RAA) after an algorithm predicts she will commit a crime based on her dreams.

We follow Sara's journey from the moment she lands at LAX and is informed of her imminent risk to her husband. The tension builds as she is transferred to a retention centre, where she meets other women in similar predicaments. The facility's strict and ever-changing rules make it nearly impossible for Sara to prove her innocence, and her stay is extended repeatedly. Months pass, and Sara's hope for release dwindles. The arrival of a new resident disrupts the order of the facility, leading Sara to confront the companies responsible for her loss of freedom.

The novel explores themes of privacy, freedom, and the invasive nature of technology. While the concept was fascinating and the writing was clear and urgent, I felt some parts dragged, making it difficult to stay fully engaged.

The Dream Hotel offers a thought-provoking look at the future of surveillance and personal freedom.

This novel explores a variety of topics whilst we watch a woman be detained for the contents of her dreams. We're in a version of our future, where the government is able to access details from peoples subconscious and uses it to detain them to "prevent future crimes".

The incarceration system in the US, people overusing their power, governmental surveillance and the increasing prevalence of technology all come up as topics within this book and I enjoyed the way they were explored. Whilst Sara is supposedly only detained rather than arrested, the environment she is placed in is clearly a prison with wardens and the use of the inmates labour. Lalami depicts prison culture and shows how those who have been unfairly incarcerated or who have served their times end up stuck in the system.

I also found the topic of opting into monitoring to be really interesting. We all do it. We click "Accept" on the contracts to use the social media website or the running tracker or the game without reading what they get from us clicking that button. And suddenly our data has been sold and is being analysed on the other side of the world for some research we've never heard of or is being used to advertise to us more effectually. And this book explores the very real possibility of it being used against us when we've committed no crime. It's a little dramatic, sure, but it's not that far off the modern day truth.

I thought the PTSD representation was done well, we see some inmates after they leave the institution and seeing their very real reactions to this and the inability to immediately adapt back to the "free" world is something that is often overlooked when people are freed from incarceration.

The idea of "there's no need to worry if you've not done anything wrong" is also shown here. If you're not a criminal you've got nothing to hide. But that's only as long as the laws line up with morality and they so often do not. Our main character Sara is just like most of us. She doesn't break the law, she's just a normal citizen. But she can't get out.

I did struggle with the formatting of this book, I read it via a NetGalley ARC (thank you!) and there were sections that were intended to be tables but instead were out of order lists as well as the paragraphs being broken up weirdly. Usually this doesn't impact my reading experience too much but that combined with the writing style did leave me a little disconnected from the story, especially in the middle of the book.

Despite the formatting and disconnection issues, this book does a fantastic job at analysis on the topics of autonomy, privacy, and crime in a world that is increasingly running on algorithms. Definitely one that made me think!!

Imagine a world where you could be imprisoned for your dreams. It’s like an extension of being imprisoned for your thoughts. At which point I’m sure 100% of humans would qualify.

This would be a great book to have discussions of the ethics of technology on - the premise of this book isn’t a million miles away from the situation now. How many times have you just clicked “agree” on some tech company T&Cs without thinking about it?

I really enjoyed (I think) the thought experiments this book got me into, I did find the main character frustrating at points (especially at the beginning), and I didn’t really care much about any of the other characters which is why it’s only 3* for me.

This book started out exciting and immediately gave me Black Mirror vibes. And then it just dragged. Sara over-analysed why she was taken to “the dream hotel” away from her young children, which to me would be tragic, yet I could not connect with her emotionally. Halfway through, there seemed to be an interesting plot twist, but nothing came of it. The ending was disappointing because there were still plotholes and I did not feel connected with any of the characters. This book had so much potential but unfortunately did not live up to it for me

The Dream Hotel is a really interesting dystopian novel. It is based in a world where you can be detained when the algorithm predicts that you might be likely to commit a future crime. Such an interesting concept that has very real implications for technology and the ways in which we use it. I really enjoyed this book and was really invested in the characters and the situations they found themselves in. Really recommend to anyone looking for a thought provoking dystopian read.

Such an interesting dystopian story that really had me thinking . Its set in the near future where peoples algorithms are constantly monitored and any changes that seem to be thought of as a threat to other people are caught and the offenders are sent to an establishment called Madison - here they and their dreams are monitored until they are deemed well enough to go back into society. Sara is pulled in whilst coming through the airport and is sent to Madison where she stays whilst she is monitored - this was such an interesting story that feels quite chilling in the world that we live in now ! It is one of those stories that you feel could happen !!

I’m very confident The Dream Hotel is going to end up on lots of “If you like Black Mirror read these” lists.

Set in the near future, Madison is a crime prevention facility where all the residents are predicted to commit a crime based on an algorithm. One of the things the algorithm scans is dreams. Perfectly legal, you agreed when you signed up in a desperate attempt to get a nights sleep. I loved the premise of this. It actually reminded me of a YA book I read well over ten years ago called The Predicteds.

I found the facility really interesting, especially the role that the dream company plays. With lots of dream sequences and flashbacks, I did struggle with the lack of action or any forward momentum. I was very excited around the half way mark when we saw a shift in where the story was going, but I was a little disappointed when that didn’t really lead to much.

I really enjoyed the residents, especially Emily. By the end I was growing to really like and root for the group of women. I'd love to read more about the other residents at Madison.

Without spoiling I thought the ending was fascinating. Not at all the direction I thought. There were a few storylines I wish were tied up a little, but I did enjoy the open-endedness of Sara’s story.

I’d say this is for people who like stories that explore concepts and focus on reflection.

The formatting of this arc also made a lot of the extras like lists impossible to follow so that was a shame but not a reflection of the book.

I really wanted to love this book but it wasn't quite there for me.

It has a fantastic concept, of pre-crime culpability/retention, which is similar to the anime Psycho-pass.
Lalami is great at eliciting feelings of unease in the reader, The protagonist felt strong and layered. The description of how it feels to exist as a WOC in a western society was very relatable and accurate.

But for me I just wanted more from the book. It felt like there were so many potential chekhov's gun moments but none of them fired.

A powerful concept with a finale that kind of fell flat.