John Mandel takes readers through often hidden landscapes: campgrounds for the near-homeless, underground electronica clubs, service in luxury hotels, and life in a federal prison. In this captivating story of crisis and survival, Emily St.

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. Vincent, who had been posing as Jonathan’s wife, walks away into the night. When his scheme collapses, it obliterates countless fortunes and devastates lives. High above Manhattan, a greater crime is committed: Alkaitis's billion-dollar business is really nothing more than a game of smoke and mirrors. 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. Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star lodging on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island. Freshly mysterious.” ( The Washington Post )įrom the award-winning author of Station Eleven, an exhilarating novel set at the glittering intersection of two seemingly disparate events - the exposure of a massive criminal enterprise and the mysterious disappearance of a woman from a ship at sea. One of the Best Books of the Year: The New Yorker.Mandel writes beautifully, saying so much with such economy, and she makes a complicated plot involving so many faces and places feel effortless. The themes may be high octane, but it is the characters - and the vignettes, asides, anxieties and the very specific identities of their ghosts - which really drive the novel. That all makes it sound a bit James Bond - it’s far, far too subtle for that. And grand it is, involving Ponzi schemes and shipping routes, greed and compromise and betrayals, as it catapults from New York to Vancouver to Mauritania to Dubai and plenty of places in between. In its orbit move Mandel’s characters: Vincent, beautiful and vulnerable and sad her half-brother Paul, an addict whose sadness manifests as spite Jonathan Alkaitis, the smooth New York money man who owns the place Leon, a mild-mannered shipping executive passing through and who is therefore caught in the crossfire of the novel’s grand plot. New West End Company BRANDPOST | PAID CONTENTĪt its centre is the Hotel Caiette, the titular glass hotel: a five-star spaceship positioned on a remote tip of Vancouver island, that is surrounded by impassive water and pine trees standing sentry in the shadows.

The glass hotel review