💜Dream Hotel is written like a dream... of a nightmare. An algorithm notes that our MC has been triggered as potentially dangerous based on her risk score, as tracked by a device that helps her sleep. This was EXCEPTIONAL - but I wanted more from the ending.

This book just wasn't for me. It was thrilling, scary and felt realistic, but I didn't gel with the writing style. I enjoy third-person POV, but I found it very passive and just didn't get along with it. It's definitely not a bad book - I would just recommend picking it up in your bookshop and reading the first few pages to see if you'll get along better than I did!

Gripping speculative mystery! In a world without privacy, Sara is detained for a future "dream crime." Inventive and terrifying, exploring the cost of freedom under surveillance.

Spine chilling. Cautionary. Bold.

Welcome to the Dream Hotel. We hope you have a pleasant stay.

Where to even begin reviewing this sublime speculative story?!

Such a fascinating concept, and delivered with aplomb. It's the near future and algorithmic policing is in full force. The RAA uses personal data to stop crime before it happens.

This is progress. The ability to stop a school shooting before it happens for example? It seems reasonable? After all, if you're law abiding you have nothing to fear right? Nothing bad is going to happen to you - until it does.

Our main character Sara discovers this when she is returns from a work trip and upon arrival at the airport is taken for questioning. Her risk score is up.

What follows is the unbearably tense and cloying story of Sara's detainment. As a reader you feel the utter hopelessness, the despair, the claustrophobia. Then the rage.

The unjustness of a system that you are expected to submit to in order to prove the you are deserving to be free of control.

The conclusion couldn't have been anything else. I would love to see a follow up, I didn't really feel ready to let the story go!

The Dream Hotel is beautifully written, compulsive and astutely taps into fears I didn't even know I had.

With the explosion of use of artifical intelligence by governments the word over and always the assurance that data will be assessed by a human - food for thought indeed.

I highly recommend this book - and checking your cookies!

Risk Assessment Administration pull Sara aside in the airport as she's returning from a conference, Their data analysis of her dreams suggests that she is at risk of harming her husband,

She is sent to a detention centre for a minimum stay of 24 days to be monitored alongside her fellow harmful dreamers. The slightest infraction increases a dreamer's hold period so home can feel very far away.

A 'black mirroresque' tale that could very well come true in the not too distant future.

Imagine a world where you can be detained at His Majesty’s Pleasure for thinking about committing a crime. A world where complicated algorithms can sift through your life history, and a million observations of your behaviour, and determine that – for the safety of society – you would be better locked up.

That’s what happens in this book and Sara, a 38-year-old mother, finds herself detained at Customs in the United States and sent to Madison, a converted old school building in the middle of nowhere. To leave, she has to prove that she doesn’t think like that but the annoyances and irritations of detention don’t help and a device that reads her dreams tells the authorities exactly what is going on.

Her family and friends think that if she only followed the rules for a week or two she would be allowed out but the rules are Kafkaesque and it is not that easy for the women detained there.

She has a lawyer and occasional visits but the routine and the processes means that there are many cancellations as if the system is conspiring against her. She suspects that one of the guards is making life difficult for her as well but society doesn’t care. Potential murderers should obviously be locked up!

This is a dystopian novel but many of the elements clearly reflect the challenge of imprisonment in the modern world and its flaws. There are also people in the UK indefinitely imprisoned, like Sara, until they can somehow demonstrate that they have reformed. Worse still, the UK Ministry of Justice has what is called a ‘homicide prediction project’ being quietly developed which uses ethnicity, social class, crime data and social services data to predict those most likely to commit serious crimes. Of course, it is only in the research stage and there is nothing to worry about… …that is unless you’re on it!

It’s a good read. The strains on Sara’s family life are well-documented and there’s something about the people who might invent this kind of thing. The other detainees are an interesting bunch and the minutiae of being locked up for a long time is well explored.

And, now it turns out that it isn’t just dystopian but also slightly predictive about the world we could live in!

Sara is returning home from a work trip when she is stopped at the airport. The Risk Assessment Administration+ pulls her aside to question her regarding her risk level; Sara has been having dreams about harming her husband and she is taken to a detention centre in order to hold her for 21 days.

This was a really interesting and speculative novel about the dangers of technology and freedoms that can be taken away by this monitoring. I was really gripped and had to finish the novel to see what ultimately happens to Sara and the women she meets in the detention centre.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for a copy of the novel in exchange for an honest review.

A stunning piece of literary fiction that will pull on your heart strings and make you question so many truths. A powerful read.

Lalami knows how to tell a story and how to get the reader invested in the characters. There were a lot of interesting ideas and I enjoyed reading it but the ending felt a bit forced, and there are dystopian books that have felt more exceptional to me.
Thank you Bloomsbury and Netgalley UK for the ARC.

Absolutely brilliant! I thoroughly enjoyed it. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an advance copy, I will definitely be recommending it.

In "The Dream Hotel," Laila Lalami gives us a nightmarish look at what happens when tech companies take over the justice and legal systems of a country. It might have seemed farfetched, but we just have to look at 2025's United States to see that Lalami's vision is spot-on. Lalami tells the story of Sara, who is detained at the airport for being a possible danger to her husband. She is not told why she is a danger, and her every answer is twisted into evidence against her. Sara repeatedly tries to get out of detention but she is constantly met with an endless series of purposeful obstacles. It's strongly reminiscent of all the legal troubles we see with immigrants in the US and in the UK.

The book is anxiety inducing because Sara's predicament feels relevant and realistic. Lalami creates a believable fictional world run by algorithms because we see technocrats taking over our lives and harming us through politics and the legal system. We yearn for Sara to escape because we want to escape our real lives as well. Like Sara, we want to reclaim our stolen identities from the algorithm and the tech companies who have infiltrated our lives. Scary first-rate read. As of March 2025, this novel has been longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. I am rooting for its inclusion on the shortlist which will be announced on 2 April 2025

Oh, this is a dystopia that is too close to real life. I’m immediately grabbed by the story and want to read on
The novel tells of a potential future world where Brain implants allow the government to monitor your dreams and these together with data from social media used to monitor and convict you for being a potential criminal even before you have committed any crime . in the book, Sarah and mother and wife is travelling home from a conference abroad when immigration on entering the USA flag are opposite as a potential criminal and imprison her. The story follows her in increasingly impossible attempts to be released from incarceration.
Speculative fiction is one of my favourite genres and this book is so close to the current state in the USA that I find it quite chilling
The author has a clear flowing writing style which is a pleasure to read. The story is fast paced and kept my attention throughout. Character development is well described and you feel you know the main character well by the end of the story.
Originally published in Spain 2008 I’ve not read any of the authors previous novels.

I read an early copy of the novel on NetGalley UK in return for an unbiased review. The book was published in the UK on the 4th of April 2025 by Bloomsbury publishing plc.

This review will appear on NetGalley UK, StoryGraph, Goodreads, and my book blog bionic SarahSbooks.wordpress.com. it will also appear on Amazon UK.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advance copy of this book,

This is a good read and thought provoking read. I see that the author started to write it in 2014 and it is quite worrying to think that what would have seemed outlandish and unlikely in 2014, now seems within the realms of possibility!

the Retention Centre is well described, rather than a traditional type of institution as in the TV series Bad Girls or Orange is the New Black, this Dream Hotel reminds me more of Wentworth and of course, the authorities are always keen to stress that it is not in fact a detention but a retention centre. prison it seems

Sara is an interesting and relatable character but I felt that the other women, possibly apart from Emily, were a bit thinly drawn and I couldn't remember who was who or what their reason for retention was. It doesn't matter really because I suppose the point is that anyone can be retained. The centre is run with the inefficiency, indifference and rigidity which, according to the TV anyway, is characteristic of all American penal institutions.

In a way, not much happens but that in itself give the reader a feel for the monotony and despair of the lives of the women. No spoilers but the cynicism of the way Sara's situation is resolved is breathtaking but all too believable.

I don't think the title is an accurate reflection of the book.

The Dream Hotel isn’t a hotel at all. The people in there- stuck, without access to the outside world for indeterminate times with extensions given if they don’t follow the arbitrary rules that could change at any time. It’s not a prison. particularly because the people there haven’t committed any crime- yet. They’re there because their ‘risk score’ indicated they might and this is how crime is now managed. Dreams are ‘farmed’ via a device which was sold as a way for customers to get more rest and better sleep, and during the course of the novel we find out that it can be exploited for other means too.

This was an uncomfortable read, challenging at times. It was claustrophobic and the lack of consistency of rules was frustrating (intentionally, by the author- this isn’t a criticism).

The acknowledgment tells of research into the past though the book is set in the future and it shows, it’s written with the skill of a well-crafted historical novel.

I enjoyed that the narrative was broken up with different formats (minutes of CR Officer meetings, emails to Sarah) and that these were inconsistent, I.e they weren’t at the start or end of each chapter, which reflected the many inconsistencies the protagonist had to live through. Unfortunately I never warmed to her husband or their relationship and would have liked to for the book to feel even more tragic. Overall a very interesting premise, well executed.

I was really intrigued when I started reading The Dream Hotel, it felt like a terrifying glimpse into a potential future. Where people's every move is monitored and now even their dreams are a source of data. All in the name of crime prevention.

When Sara is detained at the airport on her return from a business trip she is confused more than anything. She's sent to Madison for monitoring, but it's more like a prison. Every minor transgression is punished with an extension to the time inmates must stay. Sara apparently has been detained due to her dreams indicating she might be a danger to her husband.

There is then a twist that tells us Madison is not what we think, rather it is a perverse way to test a product placement initiative.

I really enjoyed the first half of this book, but felt that the second half lost momentum and the story didn't really offer any satisfactory resolution to the building tension.

The Dream Hotel, Laila Lalami's fifth novel, despite its engagement with the problems of predictive algorithms and artificial intelligence, read to me like a cross between Jessamine Chan's The School for Good Mothers and Orange Is The New Black. In other words, this may have a speculative premise but it's also about big problems in the here and now: the US's carceral society, and the way that its observation and classification of behaviour especially oppresses people of colour. Sara Hussein, an archivist, is travelling back from a work conference when she's told at the airport that her 'risk score', calculated by AI, is too high, and ends up in a 'retention centre' for observation because she's supposedly more likely than the average person to commit a crime. Sara combs through her past, wondering why she ended up here - is it an association with a distant, criminal cousin, her brother's accidental death when she was a kid, or even her violent dreams, which are monitored through an implant in her skull? The Dream Hotel manages to be intensely gripping - I found it hard to stop reading, desperate to find out how Sara might escape this brutal bureaucracy - without sacrificing deeper themes. Lalami explores Sara's changing relationship to the retention centre and, implicitly, the world that she lives in as she moves from being a person who believes if she does everything 'right' she will be rewarded to somebody who realises she needs to seek solidarity with others. I had big problems with Lalami's previous novel, The Other Americans, because it wanted to spell out every single word of its message. The Dream Hotel is SO much better - OK, it has Things To Say, but Lalami trusts herself more as a writer and allows us to follow Sara's simple but satisfying journey. I'm glad that, as I predicted, this made the Women's Prize longlist.

Laila Lalami is a great writer, I love her themes and her style. This near-future dystopia is a particularly unnerving example of the genre, feeling just around the corner - not surprising, given Lalami apparently started it years ago. Thought crime being kind of a classic concept already also plays into this sense of doomed inevitability. A good read but not necessarily an enjoyable one.

My thanks to Bloomsbury and NetGalley for the ARC.

I thoroughly enjoyed this sci-fi dystopian based on an algorithm to prevent future crime. It was tense and propulsive, I read it in just a day. It kept tightly on theme, and achieved what it set out to do. The only reason it wouldn't make it as a new favourite of mine is because I wish I felt more emotional stakes from our main character, but overall I really enjoyed my time reading Dream Hotel.

The Dream Hotel is a book that enrages the reader in all the right ways. Sara is tsken into retention as tech and algorithms suggests she may commit a crime against her husband and a retention of 3 weeks may help assess that. However she's been held for months now...

This book is about how easy it is for those in authority to take ownership of our stories, how they can manipulate them to suit their narrative. This is prescient in our current world and I could see Sara's rights being stripped away and the retainees gaslight all over the place.

I feel like this novel could be a wake up call for readers, we must be alert to the stories we're told, especially by those in power, motivation is rarely about looking after the everyday woman...

The writing is evocative and well executed, compelling the reader to read on and root for Sara and the other women held at Madison. I'm incredibly grateful that I got to read a gifted netgalley copy thanks to Bloomsbury Publishing.

Creepy and all too realistic as a vision of the near future. It was a little slow in the first half and left me struggling to pick it up, but I really got going in the second half as the paced picked up.