The Glass Hotel cover art

The Glass Hotel

The haunting novel from the bestselling author of Station Eleven

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The Glass Hotel

By: Emily St. John Mandel
Narrated by: Dylan Moore
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About this listen

The New York Times bestselling novel, from the author of Station Eleven.
'A damn fine novel . . . haunting and evocative and immersive' George R R Martin, author of A Game of Thrones

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, just after a massive Ponzi scheme implodes in New York, 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.

 Contemporary Contemporary Romance Genre Fiction International Mystery & Crime Literary Fiction Mystery Romance Thriller & Suspense Fiction Crime New York Heartfelt Suspense

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Critic reviews

No one can create beautiful, enmeshed, startlingly clever worlds the way Mandel does. A new novel by her is a cause for enormous, tumultuous celebration (Daisy Johnson, author of Everything Under)
Deeply imagined, philosophically profound . . . The Glass Hotel moves forward propulsively, its characters continually on the run . . . Richly satisfying . . . The Glass Hotel is ultimately as immersive a reading experience as its predecessor [Station Eleven], finding all the necessary imaginative depth within the more realistic confines of its world . . . Revolutionary. (Ruth Franklin)
The bestselling author of Station Eleven returns with this tale about the relationship between a New York financier, his waiter lover, a threatening note and a mysterious disappearance (Times, Best books of 2020)
Beautifully written and compelling, it will find its way straight to your heart. (Red)
A fascinating and affecting read (Stylist)

I've waited five long years for this - and it was absolutely worth it.
In this stunning and meandering story full of beautiful prose ... Set in Vancouver Island's dazzling surroundings, this is an extraordinary read.

(Prima, Book of the Month)
The Glass Hotel may be the perfect novel for your survival bunker... Freshly mysterious... Mandel is a consummate, almost profligate world builder. One superbly developed setting gives way to the next, as her attention winds from character to character, resting long enough to explore the peculiar mechanics of each life before slipping over to the next... That Mandel manages to cover so much, so deeply is the abiding mystery of this book. The 300 pages of The Glass Hotel work harder than most 600-page novels... The disappointment of leaving one story is immediately quelled by our fascination in the next... The complex, troubled people who inhabit Mandel’s novel are vexed and haunted by their failings, driven to create ever more pleasant reflections of themselves in the glass. (Ron Charles, The Washington Post)
The question of what is real—be it love, money, place or memory—has always been at the heart of Ms. Mandel’s fiction... Her narratives snake their way across treacherous, shifting terrain. Certainties are blurred, truth becomes malleable and in The Glass Hotel the con man thrives... Lyrical, hypnotic images... suspend us in a kind of hallucinatory present where every detail is sharply defined yet queasily unreliable. A sense of unease thickens... Ms. Mandel invites us to observe her characters from a distance even as we enter their lives, a feat she achieves with remarkable skill. And if the result is a sense not only of detachment but also of desolation, then maybe that’s the point. (Anna Mundow, Wall Street Journal)
All stars
Most relevant
Recommended to me by the cast of the Around the NFL podcast. It was a nice but sad story, the narrator has a great voice, bar one of the accents.

Great characters throughout, all of them could have been dedicated to themselves and I would have listened.

Very Enjoyable

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Excellent writing, beautifully woven story, captivating characters. I loved it. Looking forward to the next novel by ESJM.

Beautiful

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I need to know more about the back story. I've read all her books, I think, and the connection is obvious but what are they really about? I have loved all her books but feel like a bystander not understanding what I am witnessing.

what can I call it? ethereal?

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The story was good, though not as interesting in terms of narrative as Station Eleven. It’s the counter-life story of what happens to some of the peripheral Station Eleven characters of the Georgia Flu hadn’t taken hold. But it’s hard to judge the story really because of the awful narration. It may be less annoying to North Americans, but for anyone else it’s grating. She didn’t go as far as actual vocal fry, but it sounded like she was always on the tip of it. And the accents!!! At one point I was trying to figure if the character was Irish or French….. turns out he was supposed to be from Newcastle… England. Just, bad.

Good story, terrible narration

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I loved this story, the writing was cohesive and intriguing and the the story was really gripping HOWEVER I wish that I’d read it with my own eyes instead of my ears as I found the narrators voice very grating and unemotional and she tried some bizarre accents such as québécois and Newcastle.. I found it hard to listen to such bad accents and it really spoiled the integrity of the book for me because it was comically like Dick Van Dyke awful.

Great Story but I wish the narrator didn’t attempt accents

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