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Emily St. John Mandel
Harvard Book Store's virtual event series welcomes EMILY ST. JOHN MANDEL—author of the beloved, National Book Award finalist novel, Station Eleven—for a discussion of her latest novel, The Glass Hotel. She will be joined in conversation by NINA MACLAUGHLIN, author of the acclaimed books Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter and Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung.
About The Glass Hotel
Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star lodging on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island. On the night she meets Jonathan Alkaitis, a hooded figure scrawls a message on the lobby's glass wall: "Why don't you swallow broken glass." High above Manhattan, a greater crime is committed: Alkaitis is running an international Ponzi scheme, moving imaginary sums of money through clients' accounts. When the financial empire collapses, it obliterates countless fortunes and devastates lives. Vincent, who had been posing as Jonathan's wife, walks away into the night. Years later, a victim of the fraud is hired to investigate a strange occurrence: a woman has seemingly vanished from the deck of a container ship between ports of call.
In this captivating story of crisis and survival, Emily St. John Mandel takes readers through often hidden landscapes: campgrounds for the near-homeless, underground electronica clubs, the business of international shipping, service in luxury hotels, and life in a federal prison. Rife with unexpected beauty, The Glass Hotel is a captivating portrait of greed and guilt, love and delusion, ghosts and unintended consequences, and the infinite ways we search for meaning in our lives.
Praise for The Glass Hotel
"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
"Another tale of wanderers whose fates are interconnected . . . nail-biting tension . . . Mandel weaves an intricate spider web of a story . . . A gorgeously rendered tragedy." —Booklist
"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
