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The Glass Hotel

Emily St. John Mandel (Goodreads Author)

4.08 · Rating details · 589 ratings · 283 reviews

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 ...more

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Kindle Edition, 320 pages

Expected publication: March 24th 2020 by Knopf

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Dec 04, 2019 Paromjit rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: netgalley, literary-fiction

Emily St. John Mandel writes an exquisite other worldly novel, slightly surreal as if peering through a misted looking glass, of alternative realities, paths not taken, ghosts, of a diverse and disparate cast of characters, their lives and connections revealed as the narrative goes back and forth in time. It is a story of greed, immense wealth, a financial empire built on the shifting sands of an international Ponzi scheme, reflecting the real life example of Bernie Madoff, and the financial Emily St. John Mandel writes an exquisite other worldly novel, slightly surreal as if peering through a misted looking glass, of alternative realities, paths not taken, ghosts, of a diverse and disparate cast of characters, their lives and connections revealed as the narrative goes back and forth in time. It is a story of greed, immense wealth, a financial empire built on the shifting sands of an international Ponzi scheme, reflecting the real life example of Bernie Madoff, and the financial collapse in 2008. Mandel tracks her victims and perpetrators with their interwoven lives, the characterisation sharp yet subtle, nuanced, with the capacity to see the humanity of both in a profoundly moving way. She intricately pieces together different lives, structured to intrigue, with answers that comes together holistically at the end.

Vincent is a bartender at the 5 star Hotel Caiette, located in the far north of Vancouver Island, where a message has been written on the glass wall of the lobby, 'Why don't you swallow broken glass'. This has Leon Prevant, a shipping executive, needing a drink, but the message is missed by the intended target, the owner of the hotel and investment manager, Jonathan Alkaitis. The meeting that night of Vincent and Jonathan, leads to her becoming a 'trophy wife', whose life becomes opened to a world of untold wealth and riches. However, with the swift collapse of the financial empire, lives are ruined and devastated, individuals and retirement pensions wiped out. Her brother Paul, a drug addict with a love of music, studies finance, becoming a drop out. The story begins and ends with Vincent's disappearance from the Neptune Cumberland, between which are skilfully woven in glimpses of the lives lived, greed, ghosts, corruption, regrets, reflections on paths not taken, grief, loss, memory, conscience and an overwhelming sense of guilt.

Mandel is a powerful, beautiful and offbeat writer, so atmospheric, evocative, dreamy, lingering in her wide range of often surprising locations, her scope in location and character is extraordinary. This novel felt artistic, ambitious, and highly imaginative, although possibly it may not appeal to some readers as it demands patience before its direction and purpose become clear. This is a stunning and spellbinding read, unforgettable, gripping as it penetrates the themes of financial crisis, its repercussions and the process of survival. Cannot recommend this highly enough. Many thanks to Pan Macmillan for an ARC. ...more

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Nov 06, 2019 Marchpane rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: arc-from-netgalley, 2020-releases

You may be wondering if The Glass Hotel is anything like Emily St John Mandel’s previous novel Station Eleven? The answer is no. AND yes.

Don’t get me wrong, The Glass Hotel is a very different kind of book. Its setting is realistic, not speculative. In place of Station Eleven’s focus on art (Shakespeare, music, comics) there is filthy lucre – specifically a Ponzi scheme bearing a striking resemblance to Bernie Madoff’s massive fraud. The romanticism of Station Eleven – its starlit gauziness You may be wondering if The Glass Hotel is anything like Emily St John Mandel’s previous novel Station Eleven? The answer is no. AND yes.

Don’t get me wrong, The Glass Hotel is a very different kind of book. Its setting is realistic, not speculative. In place of Station Eleven’s focus on art (Shakespeare, music, comics) there is filthy lucre – specifically a Ponzi scheme bearing a striking resemblance to Bernie Madoff’s massive fraud. The romanticism of Station Eleven – its starlit gauziness and heady atmosphere, beauty seen in a wildflower by the side of a highway clogged with rusted automobile carcasses – is dialled down here. Mandel’s writing is as evocative as ever, but her emphasis has shifted. In this novel full of morally questionable individuals, there aren’t as many pinpricks of light.

And yet common threads do emerge. Both books have a diffuse cast of characters; both narratives skip forwards and backwards, orbiting a central catastrophic worldwide event that forever bisects life into a before and an after. Station Eleven’s was a flu pandemic, The Glass Hotel’s is the 2008 financial crisis, which triggers the Ponzi scheme’s collapse. In both, the fallout from the singular event claims lives, and those that do survive are set to wandering.

There are more direct links too. Characters from the earlier book reappear here, and the idea of parallel universes – first raised in Station Eleven when characters imagine “a universe in which civilization hadn’t been so brutally interrupted” – also recurs. Mandel ties this to her theme of regret: the characters’ rueful ‘if only’ thinking manifests as reverberations between alternate realities, the ghost versions of lives that might have been, had they made different choices.

It’s as if Station Eleven – which had the feeling of a dream all along – is Oz and The Glass Hotel is Kansas. From parallel worlds arise parallel tales, different tonally but at heart, similar compositions. Mandel’s sensitive characterisations, meticulous layers, and musings on loss, regret and the frangibility of life are all here. It’s just a little less magical. 4 stars. ...more

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Jul 30, 2019 Blair rated it really liked it

Shelves: read-on-kindle, past-and-present, edelweiss, 2020-release

It must be incredibly difficult for a writer to follow a monster hit like Station Eleven. Everyone, it seems, is dying to read The Glass Hotel, and that includes me: I normally think it's a little obnoxious to review an advance copy 6+ months before the book's publication, but I simply could not wait to dive into this one. So I will get this out of the way first: The Glass Hotel is not post-apocalyptic, it's not dystopian, it's straight literary fiction (which is not to say that it doesn't have ...more

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Dec 19, 2019 Melanie marked it as to-read · review of another edition

Shelves: adult

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Oct 13, 2019 Andrew Smith rated it it was amazing

Shelves: netgalley

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. 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 deftly drawn and sympathetically brought to life 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.

My sincere thanks to Pan Macmillan and NetGalley for providing a hcopy of this book in exchange for an honest review. ...more

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Oct 17, 2019 Tammy rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

“You should eat broken glass.”

The sentence above, a remote island hotel, a Ponzi scheme, a container ship, a lost young woman, and a ghostly presence provide the framework for this masterful novel about greed, guilt, ambition, and love. The writing is languid and dreamy yet still page-turning as the stories of the interconnected characters fold back upon themselves. This is a mesmerizing, unearthly novel with characters throwing stones and crossing lines. Don’t miss it.

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Oct 20, 2019 Ceecee rated it really liked it · review of another edition

At first, I found the storyline all over the place and I felt a bit baffled because I couldn’t see where it was heading. It jumped from timeline to timeline and character to character in a seemingly random and disconnected fashion and I couldn’t join the dots! Then it all began to slot into place and I saw the reasoning and then I was able to settle into enjoying the book.

The 5 star luxury Glass Hotel was in Caiette, a small and remote part of Vancouver Island. It was owned by super wealthy At first, I found the storyline all over the place and I felt a bit baffled because I couldn’t see where it was heading. It jumped from timeline to timeline and character to character in a seemingly random and disconnected fashion and I couldn’t join the dots! Then it all began to slot into place and I saw the reasoning and then I was able to settle into enjoying the book.

The 5 star luxury Glass Hotel was in Caiette, a small and remote part of Vancouver Island. It was owned by super wealthy Jonathan Alkaitis and part of the story was about his Ponzi scheme but also was about his ‘wife’ Vincent who disappeared from the deck of the ship Neptune Cumberland. The story started with this and ended with it so the beginning is literally the end and I liked this circular approach. The storylines in the novel jump around from the 1990’s to 2029 as we follow the disastrous fall of the house of Alkaitis. I thought the financial sections about the scheme were really interesting and I thought the air of panic was really well captured although there was some relief from Jonathan that the deception was over. I found his thoughts on the fraud fascinating as he suggested that his investors must have known as no one got returns as they did unless it was too good to be true. Offloading blame? Some truth or delusion? Were they all deluded?

I loved the ‘ghostly’ element to the book and thought that was very clever as characters who were dead appeared to the living or was it their guilty conscience? The book has a number of allegorical elements and the allegory I liked the best was of the swan who should have flown south but stayed in the water too long and froze which was clearly what Jonathan did. He should have bailed long before he was unmasked and so he too froze in the water. I liked Jonathan’s Counterlife and Non Counterlife which he used to escape the day to day reality of being caught and it looked at an alternate ‘reality’. I also very much liked the character of pragmatic Vincent, the other characters were not so likeable but they were well depicted.

However, I never entirely got to grips with the jumping around in time and the tangential elements of the story which I found irritating. Overall, though, a very intriguing book which was very well written and one I will remember.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Pan McMillan for the ARC. ...more

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Oct 19, 2019 Amanda rated it really liked it · review of another edition

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 ...more

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Oct 02, 2019 Neil rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 5-stars, 2019, 2019-top-books

"There are so many ways to haunt a person, or a life…"

Emily St John Mandel seems to have two particular talents (probably a lot more, but these two stand out to me). She has a remarkable way to tell a story by jumping around in time and yet having it all make sense. She seems to be able to put the pieces together so that the reveals from the past or future come at exactly the right point to avoid the reader being either frustrated or confused. It is a great skill, I think, to be able to write "There are so many ways to haunt a person, or a life…"

Emily St John Mandel seems to have two particular talents (probably a lot more, but these two stand out to me). She has a remarkable way to tell a story by jumping around in time and yet having it all make sense. She seems to be able to put the pieces together so that the reveals from the past or future come at exactly the right point to avoid the reader being either frustrated or confused. It is a great skill, I think, to be able to write passages that the reader has known about for a while and yet are still exciting to read because the reader has been looking forward to getting the detail. Secondly, she doesn’t need many words to bring a character to life and she seems to get under the skin of her characters very quickly. Crucially, she takes her reader with her.

I have read all four previous novels by this author, but I think this is probably my favourite of the five. There is something about the writing in this book that makes it more subtle, more mature, more insightful.

Plus, in this novel, there is the added excitement of discovering two characters from the author’s best known work (Station Eleven) making a re-appearance. It suggests that (like David Mitchell), Mandel is setting books in a self-contained universe. Except! Except for the fact that here one character imagines a world where Georgian flu was not contained but ran rampant round the world destroying civilisation. That, of course, is the pandemic that drive the plot in Station Eleven. So, we have the plot of one book being imagined as a possible "alternate reality" in this book and with characters bleeding over between the books.

But this idea of characters appearing in worlds where they might not be supposed to be is actually a key idea throughout this new novel.

We begin at the end as Vincent (unusual name for a girl) falls off a ship to her death. Then we skip back a couple of decades to meet Paul, an aspiring musician with a drug problem. After some bad tablets, he has an even more serious, if different, drug problem. Then the core of the novel is the story of the collapse of a Ponzi scheme in 2008 (we know the man at the centre of this as Jonathan Alkaitis, but the crime is modelled on Bernard L. Madoff's Ponzi scheme which collapsed at exactly this time).

We follow Vincent, Paul and Jonathan, along with a host of other characters, as their lives connect and influence each others, or as their actions impact on others. I don’t want to give the plot away - a huge part of the fun in reading this book is seeing how all the pieces gradually pull together and I would not want to spoil that. But one thing many of the characters do often is imagine "alternate realities", the way life might have been (as with the Georgian flu epidemic mentioned above) and, at times, "see" people who should not be where they are seen. Are these characters ghosts, are they just products of guilty consciences, are they visitors from an "alternate reality"? The novel never strays into science fiction or fantasy, but it also never seeks to particularly resolve that question: this, it seems, is an exercise for the reader. One way or another, our protagonists are haunted by lives they might have lived or by lives they lost somewhere along the way.

At the end of the novel, most of the pieces are in place. I find myself pleased rather than frustrated at any loose ends: I want to spend more time with these characters thinking about what happened to them. As with this author’s other books, the pieces don’t come at you in the order you expect. But, also as in this author’s other books, the pieces are clearly organised to come in a very clever and specific order and to be the right size and shape to fill exactly the hole you as a reader were waiting to be filled at that point. I have finished every one of Emily St John Mandel’s book full of admiration for the way she tells a story. It’s a wonderful approach to storytelling and here her writing seems to have moved up a gear, too, making this a thoroughly enjoyable book to read.

My thanks to Pan Macmillan, via NetGalley, for an ARC in exchange for this honest review. ...more

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Dec 12, 2019 Nenia ⚡ Aspiring Evil Overlord ⚡ Campbell rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: literary-fiction, les-arcs-de-triomphes

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So I just watched this amazing film that came out this year that nobody seems to have heard of, and it's called The Laundromat . Meryl Streep and Antonio Banderas are in it. The movie, through a series of seemingly disconnected vignettes, tells the story of shell corporations, fraud, and corruption, on a global scale.

While reading THE GLASS HOTEL, in all of its haunting glory, I thought of The Laundromat because at its heart, it is also a ...more

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Jul 26, 2019 Jessica Jeffers rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, edelweiss

"I was a thief too," I tell him, "we both got corrupted."

Station Eleven is one of my all-time favorite books and I was unbelievably excited when I found out that, more than five years later, Emily St. John Mandel was finally releasing a new novel. I was even more excited when I discovered I could download an advance copy of this book on off Edelweiss.

It's incredibly difficult to summarize the plot of this one without getting too into spoilers, but one very important thing you should know is that this is a very different story from Station Eleven. Don't come to this expecting another piece of post-apocalyptic fiction or even anything in the sci-fi genre (except for some light narrative touches that barely qualify: (view spoiler)).

This is about a woman named Vincent who, in the opening pages of the book, is falling off the side of a container ship off the cost of Western Africa in 2018. We then flash back to the 90s and begin learning about the twisty road that led her to that container ship. We begin with the troubles of her half-brother Paul, who struggled with heroin addiction and failed out of college. A few years later, in her twenties, Vincent is working as a bartender at a hotel on an island in British Columbia when she meets Jonathan Alkaitis, a wealthy finance guy and owner of the hotel. The same night, Paul writes a cryptic message on the window of the hotel lobby, which is seen by Leon Prevant, a shipping company executive who is a guest in the hotel.

The Glass Hotel weaves together the stories of these myriad characters in a style that is very similar to Station Eleven. Over the course of twenty years, the characters' lives intersect in surprising and sometimes disastrous ways. The journey takes us to the world of Manhattan high-finance, a medium-security prison, the sixties bohemian art world, and eventually to the container ship in the Atlantic Ocean. Along the way, we peek inside the minds of hotel employees and reluctant white-collar criminals, aging hippies, and retirees who have lost their entire life savings to a Ponzi scheme.

The writing here is little bit rough at times. Some of the sentences were unnecessarily long, to the point where I was losing the thread of what they were describing, and there was some awkward phrasing, but I am willing to give Mandel the benefit of the doubt because it is 9 months until publication and things may get smoothed out as the manuscript goes through further revisions. In the grand scheme of things, my complaints are minor and may not factor in to the final version of the book. Mandel excels at weaving together the many storylines and points of view, though it takes a significant amount of time before the plot begins to feel cohesive and there are a couple of things that get dropped: (view spoiler). Don't give up on this book too quickly, though; trust that Mandel is ultimately going to reward your patience. I am excited to revisit the final version of this book. ...more

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Jan 15, 2020 Emma rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I was very keen to read another book by this author after Station Eleven. This was nothing like that book, in plot or genre, but it was equally gripping, fascinating and intriguing. I enjoyed the way the different strands of time and character were interlinked. Many thanks to Netgalley for an arc of this book.

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Feb 16, 2020 Diane S ☔ rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I'm not usually attracted to books that feature financial elements, but in this case I made an exception. Simply because I love how this author writes and the way she puts together a story. I'm so glad I went with my intuition, which shows sometimes you just need to trust a favored author.

Although this is about a Ponzi scheme, it is so much more. It is the story of Vincent, a female, named after Edna St. Vincent Milay , and she is a fasinating character. A sort of chameleon, trying to find her ...more

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Nov 06, 2019 Henk marked it as to-read · review of another edition

Sounds good! Ponzi schemes and a bunch of interconnected narratives: count me in!

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Jan 20, 2019 Izzy marked it as to-be-released · review of another edition

thank you emily st. john mandel for blessing us mortals with a new release

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Oct 26, 2019 Marina rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favourites

Don’t read the blurb before reading ‘The Glass Hotel’.
I didn’t. If I had, I’d have probably been put off by words such as "finance" and "shipping".
Because I didn’t read the blurb, I had no idea what was going on most of the time! Characters flickered in and out across fractured timelines and seemingly disparate events. Yet still, the other-worldly beauty of the writing compelled me to read on.
Hate the thought of a loose plot and “other-worldly beauty”? Me too. But not this time.

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Dec 24, 2019 switterbug (Betsey) rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Station Eleven is a hard act to follow, a stunning post-apocalyptic novel (being turned into a series) that stands on my shelf as arguably one of the best books of the decade. The staying power of art, music, and performance and the nuanced exploration of memories are just some of the story’s refined themes. “Survival is insufficient” is a standout line, however banal on the surface. The story explores the aftermath of a flu epidemic that killed off most of the population. In The Glass Hotel Station Eleven is a hard act to follow, a stunning post-apocalyptic novel (being turned into a series) that stands on my shelf as arguably one of the best books of the decade. The staying power of art, music, and performance and the nuanced exploration of memories are just some of the story’s refined themes. “Survival is insufficient” is a standout line, however banal on the surface. The story explores the aftermath of a flu epidemic that killed off most of the population. In The Glass Hotel (also being made into a series), a Ponzi scheme is the juncture of catastrophe--financial death instead of death by disease. There’s a bit of meta- in this new novel, as there’s a line referring to that flu pandemic (that hasn’t yet come) and even a minor character from SE that becomes a major character here. And both books begin at an end.

“Begin at the end” are the first words of The Glass Hotel. But as St. John Mandel demonstrates, time is fluid, and the author once again nimbly links her characters’ lives and fates. Some find purpose after disaster, and others distinctly deteriorate. Still others navigate a borderless future and welcome the “sense of being outside of time and space.” The most compelling character is Vincent, a young woman that became the trophy girlfriend of the Ponzi schemer, posing as his wife.

There’s nothing fragile about Vincent, who is inextricably hewn to her half-brother, Paul, whom she rarely sees. Their coiled fate is subtly and powerfully drawn with a gradual and contextual force. She’s affected by the death of her mother, but Paul is ruined by the “idea” of Vincent. “I’ve only ever hated Vincent’s incredible good fortune at being Vincent instead of being me…” He envies her natural creativity and strength of survival, which he eternally strives for and fails, even when he is successful. His core is hollow.

While SE is set in the near future, Hotel takes place in the past. St. John Mandel consistently pens lucid, haunting and moody prose. Both novels tackle crisis; our personal ghosts; borders; memory, and the nature of time. I’m not going to rehash the plot; I’m more interested in the similarities and differences of both books, like bookends with completely different stories. The author purposely linked the two herself, which adds to my fascination. SE is exuberant and optimistic, eclipsing collapse with creativity. GH is stark, lean, angular, shadowy but just as keen. More profiteering than propheteering. Eclipsing creativity with collapse. But there’s doomed beauty in GH, glittering like faint stars after a storm. There’s paradoxically a sense of walls between people and places, and yet a conflux of conections and lands distant to each other—NYC, British Columbia, and the Toronto faraway Hotel Caiette, inaccessible except by boat.

Both books are elegant, mosaic-like, but GH’s complexity is often latent or distant. The schemer, Jonathan Alkaitis, summons a “counterlife” to survive. Vincent’s counterlife is admirable—she takes on various roles like skin, and she isn’t a thief like Paul or Jonathan.

My only complaint was that, unlike the warmth of SE, The Ghost Hotel felt remote, whereas Station Eleven was spirited. The characters in Hotel were predominantly unknown to me, even when they became familiar. Perhaps St. John Mandel wanted them to be unknowable. I spent much of the book trying to reach out emotionally to the story and its people, but I kept sliding backwards into the gully of murk. Although I assigned this one 4 stars instead of the 5 I gave to SE, it didn’t disappoint. The Glass Hotel just didn’t embrace me the same way. I did enjoy choosing my favorite characters, though. Vincent, her anti-hero blend of shrugs and grace, and Walter, the loner who feels at home at the isolated hotel. None of the characters came across as archetypes, which is genius!

Sorry about my lengthy review, nobody likes a long review. I’m enchanted with Emily St. John Mandel’s haunting style of writing, her brilliant themes, and her clarity of prose. If you are already a fan of her writing, it’s a no-brainer--get thee to a bookstore. If you’ve never read her work, read both these novels--I think of them as a whole, these bookends. But SE is 2/3 and GH is a necessary 1/3 bond to the latter, there’s a connective tissue. Her work will echo in my heart for years to come.

(P.S. There are two more novels out there of hers that I will certainly be acquiring). ...more

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Oct 07, 2019 Susan rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Oh I could stay in THE GLASS HOTEL forever. Dreamy, spectral. Intricate and delicate, web and gauze. This book is going to be so huge...

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Nov 29, 2019 SueLucie rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: netgalley

What a wonderful book. I enjoyed it immensely, everything about it - the characters, the settings, the relentlessly building sense of doom, the imaginings of paths not taken and how things might have been. A financial scam collapses with repercussions for many of the characters, their stories interwoven seamlessly over several decades with the effect that we know some of the outcome at the beginning but have to wait till the end for a complete picture. I couldn’t put it down until I found out ...more

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May 24, 2018 Sarah Esmae Wolfe marked it as to-read

From the article https://www.thebookseller.com/news/st...
"Senior editor at Picador... said St. John Mandel's prose was "as poignant as ever", with the "galloping" pace of a thriller. Referring to the book as a "brilliant follow up" to Station Eleven, she also hinted the book will include a character that fans might recognise."

i need it now please k thanks bye

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Nov 11, 2019 Chris Haak rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Emily St John Mandel has created yet another great set of characters -who feel so real and almost like friends- and a wonderful story. Totally different from Station Eleven, but I had the same fun reading it.
Thank you Random House and Edewleiss for the ARC!

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Jan 22, 2020 Bruce Katz rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: american-fiction

Oh my -how to talk about this book in an intelligible way, without turning people away?

It is a matryoshka doll of a novel. Tales with tales, interwoven, twisting willy nilly among past, present, and future. Is there a "story"? A narrative arc? Yes. No. Not in a traditional way but certainly intelligible, just as a mystery becomes clearer as clues are uncovered.

The book begins at the end, exactly as it says: 1. Begin at the end: plummeting down the side of the ship in the storm's wild darkness, Oh my -how to talk about this book in an intelligible way, without turning people away?

It is a matryoshka doll of a novel. Tales with tales, interwoven, twisting willy nilly among past, present, and future. Is there a "story"? A narrative arc? Yes. No. Not in a traditional way but certainly intelligible, just as a mystery becomes clearer as clues are uncovered.

The book begins at the end, exactly as it says: 1. Begin at the end: plummeting down the side of the ship in the storm's wild darkness, breath gone with the shock of falling, my camera flying away through the rain. And ends (more or less, because wait! there's more!) in the same place: 1. Begin at the end: Plummeting down the side of the ship The horizon flipping once, twice, camera flying from my hand It felt like plunging into shards of ice. 2. No, begin twenty minutes earlier. Who's falling? Vincent, both times. And who's Vincent? She's... well, there's a hell of a story in the answer.

"The Glass Hotel" follows a number of main characters -- Vincent, her half-brother Paul, Jonathan Alkaitis (the millionaire with whom she lives as not-quite-wife), Olivia Collins, Ella Kasperksy, a few others -- and a host of lesser ones, so many that it's sometimes hard to remember who is who, whose lives intersect... though not in a linear fashion, because time isn't linear here. We read of an event, a person, phrase, a face seen in passing, and we take it in without any special attention, and then the same event/person/phrase/face will reappear many pages later and our understanding of what we read earlier is changed.

The thread that holds them all together is Vincent, a young woman we first meet when she's a 13-year old girl impulsively misbehaving and who we soon meet again tending bar at the titular hotel, Hotel Caiette, a "glass-and-cedar palace" on the coast of British Columbia. The place where so many of the characters will first encounter one another. Caiette is reachable only by boat, no roads in or out, and that's part of its appeal. In the words of one character: Our guests in Caiette want to come to the wilderness but they don't want to be IN the wilderness. They just want to look at it, ideally through the window of a luxury hotel. They want to be wilderness-adjacent. It's an observation about wealth and culture that rings true, but it's also an expression of a theme that will recur throughout the book: what something appears to be and what it really is. What we think we know about others and who they truly are. What we believe about ourselves and what the truth is. The irresistible offer of wealth and the scheme that lies behind it. The features gray life passed behind bars and the redeemed mental life that runs alongside it: ... like a creeping sense of unreality, a sense of collapsing borders, reality seeping into the counter life and the counter life seeping into memory.

Do I make the book sound like some sterile, overly intellectualized bit of self-absorbed navel gazing? It's not, not at all. Emily St. John Mandel has a gift for making us feel an irresistible narrative momentum even when we're not at all sure what's going on. And you REALLY, REALLY do want to know what's going on; you want to be surprised and intrigued and delighted as each new aspect is revealed. (I can't imagine how she plotted out the book, how many threads and pieces of paper had to be assembled and reassembled, all those balls kept in the air.)

The book is filled with mysteries and ghostly apparitions (!), betrayal, self-delusion and self-discovery, connections made and connections missed. Other reviewers have spoken of the book in terms of themes like greed and morality, how people respond to adversity and how they rationalize their awful behavior. All these things are here. And more. If you like books that challenge you, if you like AHA! moments and tours de force, if you like stories that unfold slowly and smartly, if you like "Station Eleven" -- give this one your time and attention. ...more

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Jan 21, 2020 Kathleen rated it liked it · review of another edition

If you are looking for a plot based book you should look elsewhere. I think. Technically, there is a plot, but the book wanders and meanders so loosely through characters and time that it's a bit hard to see until you're well along. If you like meandering through characters lives and thoughts, slowly walking through their lives in their shoes, then I think you will really like this. In fact, I liked it, but I wasn't smitten the first third of the book. It was really slow for me and felt ...more

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Nov 18, 2019 Bethany Everett rated it it was ok · review of another edition

This is a really hard book to rate for me because I feel as if this simply was just not a book. This was a collection of life struggles and lessons and observations through a million different characters, and you never really get the satisfaction of understanding. There was no real story to this, in the traditional sense. This felt to me like a book of short stories all mashed together into a confusing ball of a book. I enjoyed the start, as it follows one character (Paul) through grief and ...more

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Dec 16, 2019 Barbara Young rated it it was ok · review of another edition

This book is a disconnected mess of people, places and times, none of which the author made me care about. I wouldn't have even believed it was the same author that wrote Station Eleven, a book I love and have read several times. if she hadn't gratuitiously inserted a character from that earlier book. Two stars, but only because I actually finished it.

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Jan 27, 2020 Dayle (the literary llama) rated it liked it · review of another edition

3.5 Stars

I’m having such conflicting thoughts. It took me days to process what I was going to write in a review for THE GLASS HOTEL. So buckle in ‘cause I’m just gonna start rambling and hope I end up somewhere coherent.
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No one writes like Emily St. John Mandel. It’s brilliant. Gorgeously quotable with characters and storylines that weave around each other or pass by with a wave. Add in a touch of non-linear timeline and it dazzles the mind while also stimulating the puzzler within.
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And my ...more

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Sep 09, 2019 Diana rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: coming-of-age, new-york, art, addiction, music, artists, 2020, money

In every age, people cross lines into questionable moral territory, but it seems like in the age we find ourselves in right now, it's happening more widely, more loudly. (I'm talking to you, Republican members of Congress; to you, ICE agents and other government employees running concentration camps; to you, evangelicals who voted for this president*; to you, Republicans who go along because you like the tax bill and the gutting of financial and environmental regulations.) It looks like Emily ...more

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Oct 27, 2019 Kathryn rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I am indebted to the bookseller friend who passed along an Advance Reader Edition of this book after spotting it on my future reads index card (allowing me to feel grateful/slightly superior for maintaining an old school rather than cell phone list).

The Glass Hotel is not post-apocalyptic and is not set in Michigan. What this book does have in common with Mandel's blockbuster hit Station Eleven is a dancing chronology, intriguing characters and a plot that kept me turning the pages well into the ...more

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Jun 01, 2018 mikhaela marked it as to-read · review of another edition

i miss emily st. john mandel's writing something fierce

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Jan 17, 2020 Mandy rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

so good that I resented every moment I had to do something other than read this book. Put down everything else and read this. You're welcome.

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About Emily St. John Mandel

Emily St. John Mandel

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Emily St. John Mandel was born and raised on the west coast of British Columbia, Canada. She studied contemporary dance at the School of Toronto Dance Theatre and lived briefly in Montreal before relocating to New York.

She is the author of five novels, including The Glass Hotel (spring 2020) and Station Eleven (2014.) Station Eleven was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner ...more