The Glass Hotel
A Novel
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3.9 • 202 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE
A Time Magazine Must Read Book of 2020
A Globe and Mail Top 100 Book of the Year
#1 national bestseller
New York Times bestseller
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 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, The Glass Hotel moves between the ship, the skyscrapers 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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Emily St. John Mandel is emerging as one of the most exciting literary voices around. Her previous bestseller, Station Eleven, centred on a Shakespearean troupe traversing a postapocalyptic America. In The Glass Hotel, she weaves together a deeply affecting, mesmerizing story that involves a luxe resort on a remote British Columbia island perpetually shrouded in fog; an estranged brother and sister flung apart by resentment, addiction, and betrayal; a Bernie Madoff–level Ponzi scheme; and a humungous container ship that serves as a refuge for the book’s main character, Vincent, when her life falls apart. Mandel’s scope is astonishing. Even more so is her talent for writing characters who are so singular and specific they feel like they could walk off the page.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mandel's wonderful novel (after Station Eleven) follows a brother and sister as they navigate heartache, loneliness, wealth, corruption, drugs, ghosts, and guilt. Settings include British Columbia's coastal wilderness, New York City's fashionable neighborhoods and corporate headquarters, a container ship in international waters, and a South Carolina prison. In 1994, 18-year-old drug-using dropout Paul Smith visits his 13-year-old half-sister, Vincent, in Vancouver. Vincent has just lost her mother and acquired her first video camera. Five years later, in the wilderness north of Vancouver, Vincent tends bar at a luxury hotel where Paul works as the night houseman. Paul leaves after writing on a window in acid marker a message even he doesn't understand. Vincent relocates to the East Coast and what Mandel calls the kingdom of money to play trophy wife for investor Jonathan Alkaitis. When Jonathan's Ponzi scheme collapses, he goes to prison, where his victims' ghosts visit him. Finished with Jonathan and the affluent lifestyle and ignored by her best friend, Vincent takes a job as assistant cook on a container ship. Paul, meanwhile, has set Vincent's old videos to music. The videos have helped Paul, despite a lifelong drug problem, tap into his creative gifts. Using flashbacks, flash-forwards, alternating points-of-view, and alternate realities, Mandel shows the siblings moving in and out of each other's lives, different worlds, and versions of themselves, sometimes closer, sometimes further apart, like a double helix, never quite linking. This ingenious, enthralling novel probes the tenuous yet unbreakable bonds between people and the lasting effects of momentary carelessness. 200,000-copy announced first printing.)
Customer Reviews
Glass Hotel
Confusing