Vincent has a “very particular gift”: she’s a lithe social chameleon. Her best friend drives the hotel boat her brother, Paul – aspiring composer, recovering addict – sweeps the floors. Mixing cocktails in the hotel bar is directionless Vincent, a young woman marking time in her remote hometown, a stifling place with one road and “two dead ends”. This is a tale of Ponzi schemes, not pestilence.Įmily St John Mandel. 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. The “Georgia Flu” is lurking, but we will never learn if it is days, months, or a year away. Ī handful of quietly placed clues suggest that The Glass Hotel exists in the same universe as Station Eleven, in a time before the outbreak. How better to while away a stint in lockdown than by bending our waking terrors into the most comforting and redemptive of shapes – the narrative arc. But as we face Covid-19, the strange, masochistic allure of havoc-lit has catapulted Mandel’s post-pandemic tale of itinerant Shakespearean actors back into bestseller territory. That book was always going to cast a shadow over its successor – such is the curse of a career-defining blockbuster. F ew readers will come to Emily St John Mandel’s fifth novel, The Glass Hotel, unaware of her fourth, 2014’s Station Eleven, which imagined a world ravaged by a hyper-lethal form of swine flu.

The glass hotel emily st john