THE GLASS HOTEL

EMILY ST JOHN MANDEL Picador, 320pp, £14.99, ebook £8.99

may not be all that much that stays with you. Certainly not the prose, which is never very exciting. The Glass Hotel is a plot- and conceptdriven, highly visual novel that would work just as well on screen. That doesn’t mean it isn’t enjoyable — but you just might find yourself wondering why you’re reading it rather than watching it.’ Emily St John Mandel has followed her bestselling Station-11, set in a post-pandemic wilderness, with a novel that, as Beejay Silcox observed in the Guardian, ‘exists in the same universe, in a time before the outbreak. Mandel has not penned a ticking-clock prequel; rather, her new novel is a portrait of everyday obliviousness, the machinery of late neoliberalism juddering along with characteristic inequity. This is a tale of Ponzi schemes, not pestilence.’ In the Evening Standard, Phoebe Luckhurst thought it ‘elegant, evocative and assured’. At its centre, wrote Luckhurst, is the Hotel Caiette, on a remote tip of Vancouver Island: ‘In its orbit move Mandel’s characters: Vincent, beautiful, 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 mildmannered shipping executive passing through and caught in the crossfire of the novel’s grand plot.’

Stuart Kelly in the Scotsman was bowled over by ‘the real deal, psychologically astute, morally wise – and all done in stingingly beautiful prose’. Only Claire Lowdon in the Sunday Times had doubts. Mandel is a ‘terrific storyteller’ but ‘when you’ve finished oohing and aahing, there