For Your Reading List

Credit: Knopf, Sarah Shatz

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

Emily St. John Mandel’s writing is something to luxuriate in. This sounds hyperbolic, but she writes the kind of prose that makes you want to pick up a pen while reading to underline the sentences that catch your breath — which can be found on just about every page. Her newest novel, The Glass Hotel, is no exception.

The book's intricate plot is nonlinear but generally centers around the unraveling of a massive Bernie Madoff-esque Ponzi scheme and a large collection of characters connected by the fraud. Among others, there's Jonathan Alkaitis, the businessman behind the crime; his young girlfriend Vincent who meets Alkaitis while bartending at a luxury hotel in the wilderness outside Vancouver (the titular establishment); Vincent's half-brother; a series of ill-fated investors; and Alkaitis's employees, who narrate the accelerating downfall of the Ponzi scheme as if it were a Grecian Drama in a particularly wonderful section of the book entitled "The Office Chorus."

While there is something dreamlike about the ambience Mandel creates in The Glass Hotel - the novel isn't exactly escapist. One of Mandel’s strength as a writer is her ability to turn implausible scenarios into something that feels immediate and real — perhaps even better illustrated in her last novel, the National Book Award Finalist Station Eleven in which Mandel follows survivors in the aftermath of a sickness that wipes out a majority of the world’s population.

So it's probably incorrect to say that this book (or Station Eleven...obviously) would be a comforting read in the midst of self-isolation and social distancing. But in a book about greed and loss and loneliness, Mandel has also crafted a distinctly relevant story about the strange invisible threads that connect us, and the dizzying understanding that there are infinite paths our lives can take — all of this culminating in the simple fact that Mandel is a storyteller at the top of her game. Get your copy. —Jillian Karande