The Dream Hotel: A Read with Jenna Pick
A Novel
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- 11,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
NATIONAL BESTSELLER ● READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK AS FEATURED ON TODAY ● From Laila Lalami—the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist and a “maestra of literary fiction” (NPR)—comes a riveting and utterly original novel about one woman’s fight for freedom, set in a near future where even dreams are under surveillance.
Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA’s algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days.
The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes. With every deviation from the strict and ever-shifting rules of the facility, their stay is extended. Months pass and Sara seems no closer to release. Then one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and leading Sara on a collision course with the very companies that have deprived her of her freedom.
Eerie, urgent, and ceaselessly clear-eyed, The Dream Hotel artfully explores the seductive nature of technology, which puts us in shackles even as it makes our lives easier. Lalami asks how much of ourselves must remain private if we are to remain free, and whether even the most invasive forms of surveillance can ever capture who we really are.
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Lalami (The Other Americans) delivers a stirring dystopian tale of dwindling privacy and freedom in the digital age. In the late 2030s, Sara T. Hussein, 38, a Muslim American art archivist, is detained by officials from the Risk Assessment Administration, who claim data recorded by her Dreamsaver implant, which was originally developed to treat sleep apnea, predicts she will murder her husband. She's held at a repurposed elementary school for "observation," which stretches on for nearly a year, and forced to work in the de facto prison's laundry room. "Retainees," as prisoners like Sara are called, are promised their freedom if they're compliant and they stop dreaming about potential crimes, but she's released only after making a nuisance by organizing a work stoppage. She returns home to her husband and twin toddlers, who urge her to stay out of trouble, but she immediately starts planning to help her friends at the retention center regain their freedom, partnering with a former retainee whom she met inside. The premise calls to mind Philip K. Dick's The Minority Report, but Lalami's version is chillingly original, echoing widespread fears about the abuse of surveillance technology, and she balances high-concept speculative elements with deep character work. This surreal story feels all too plausible.
