Description

* LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2025 *
* A READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK MARCH 2025 *

‘A gripping, Kafkaesque foray into an all-too-plausible future’ JENNIFER EGAN
‘So cleverly conceived, so relevant, that everyone should read it and sweat’ THE TIMES
‘Extraordinary’ RUMAAN ALAM
‘Absolutely unputdownable’ SANDRA NEWMAN

Sara is returning home from a conference abroad when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside at the airport. Using data from her dreams, their algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming her husband. For his safety, she must be transferred to a retention centre, and kept under observation for twenty-one days.

But as Sara arrives to be monitored alongside other dangerous dreamers, she discovers that with every deviation from the facility’s strict and ever-shifting rules, their stays can be extended – and that getting home to her family is going to cost much more than just three weeks of good behaviour.

Then, one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and leading Sara on a collision course with the very companies that have deprived her of her freedom.

The Dream Hotel is a gripping speculative mystery about the seductive dangers of the technologies that are supposed to make our lives easier. As terrifying as it is inventive, it explores how well we can ever truly know those around us – even with the most invasive surveillance systems in place.

Publisher Review

The Dream Hotel offers a stark vision of the future – in which America is a surveillance state, ruled by the intertwined forces of capital and government, powered by an all-too-fallible algorithm that determines criminality based on citizen’s dreams. That’s plainly a metaphor for extant practices of social control, but Laila Lalami’s extraordinary new novel is more than just a political warning; the book is an exploration of the psyche itself, the strange ungovernable forces of fate and emotion that make us human — Rumaan Alam, bestselling author of LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND A gripping, Kafkaesque foray into an all-too-plausible future where data collection penetrates interior life, The Dream Hotel is also an elegant meditation on identity, motherhood, and what we sacrifice, unthinkingly, for the sake of convenience — Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of THE CANDY HOUSE I was utterly gripped, caught up, as if I was living the same nightmare as Sara. It felt terrifyingly and convincingly close — Esther Freud A terrifying, thought-provoking and timely exploration of the inevitable march of algorithms and data-harvesting into our innermost lives. The Dream Hotel offers not only a real-feeling diorama of an extensively-surveilled prison population, but a masterclass in the art of cortisol-raising – to be filed alongside The Trial and The School for Good Mothers — Jo Harkin Stellar … There are echoes of The Handmaid’s Tale here – as Margaret Atwood does in that book, Lalami builds a convincing near-future dystopia out of current events … But Lalami’s scenario is unique and well-imagined – interspersed report sheets, transcripts, and terms-of-service lingo have a realistic, poignant lyricism that exposes the cruel bureaucracy in which Sara is trapped … And the story exposes the particular perniciousness of big tech’s capacity to exploit our every movement, indeed practically every thought … Striking … An engrossing and troubling dystopian tale * Kirkus *