The Glass Hotel

A damn fine novel . . . haunting and evocative and immersive - George R R Martin, author of A Game of Thrones

The extraordinary novel from the bestselling, award-winning author of Station Eleven.

Vincent is the beautiful 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, Emily St. John Mandel's The Glass Hotel moves between the ship, the towers 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.

One of Barack Obama's Favourite Books of 2020

Praise for The Glass Hotel

'A lovely, beautifully written and constructed novel that I couldn't put down, full of memorable, unusual characters... Mandel's agility with time in this story was a marvel.' - Kristin Hannah, author of The Nightingale

'Elegant . . . beguiling . . . the joys of The Glass Hotel are participatory: piecing together the connections and intersections of Mandel's human cartography, a treasure map ripped to pieces' - Guardian

'Though its characters were inspired by Bernie Madoff, his victims, and his enablers, there's much more to this novel than ripped-from-the-headlines voyeurism; it's a gorgeously constructed tapestry, each jewellike sentence building to one of the most devastating, moving endings in recent memory. I read it when I was feeling uniquely exhausted by the demands of COVID-era living; I still couldn't put it down.' - Vanity Fair

'Long-anticipated... At its heart, this is a ghost story in which every boundary is blurred, from the moral to the physical... In luminous prose, Mandel shows how easy it is to become caught in a web of unintended consequences and how disastrous it can be when such fragile bonds shatter under pressure. A strange, subtle, and haunting novel.' - Kirkus Reviews, starred

'The Glass Hotel is a masterpiece, just as good - if not better - than its predecessor. It's a stunning look at how people react to disasters, both small and large, and the temptation that some have to give up when faced with tragedy.' - NPR

'A wondrously entertaining novel... The Glass Hotel is never dull. Tracing the permutations of its characters' lives, from depressing apartments in bad neighborhoods to posh Dubai resorts to Manhattan bars, Colorado campgrounds, and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival is like following the intricate patterns on Moroccan tiles.' - Slate

'Mandel's wonderful novel (after Station Eleven) follows a brother and sister as they navigate heartache, loneliness, wealth, corruption, drugs, ghosts, and guilt... This ingenious, enthralling novel probes the tenuous yet unbreakable bonds between people and the lasting effects of momentary carelessness.' - Publishers Weekly, starred