The Glass Hotel

The Glass Hotel is a novel by the Canadian writer Emily St. John Mandel, published in 2020. It is her fifth novel, and it follows the aftermath of a graffiti incident at a hotel on Vancouver Island and the collapse of an international Ponzi scheme.

Paul is a student at the University of Toronto when the book begins, hoping to make friends with the members of a band and handing out tablets at a nightclub; one of them dies not long afterwards, and Paul goes into hiding at the apartment of his half-sister Vincent. Five years on, the two of them are working at a hotel at the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island, in a fictional place called Caiette. Graffiti is found on one of the lobby windows, written with an acid marker, and Paul is suspected of it and leaves before he can be dismissed. The message appears to be aimed at Jonathan Alkaitis, a wealthy investor who owns the hotel, and Vincent, who is working the bar, becomes involved with him while pretending to be somebody she is not.

Mandel's novels tend to be assembled out of a large cast and to move across time rather than following a single investigation. This one takes a financial fraud and a piece of vandalism as the two points from which everything else in the story is worked out, and it was her first book after Station Eleven. The fictional hamlet of Caiette is based on the real settlement of Quatsino.