“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, and what we sacrifice, unthinkingly, for the sake of convenience.”
—Jennifer Egan, author of The Candy House
“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 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, author of Leave the World Behind
“Laila Lalami’s brilliant and anxiety-provoking novel The Dream Hotel … makes you question why we aren’t doing more to protect our privacy right now.”
—Ann Patchett, best-selling author and owner of Parnassus Books
“The world in Lalami’s novel feels one step away from ours, which makes it astonishingly easy to slip inside. The women in The Dream Hotel grapple with the ways in which capitalism and technology sell off the pieces of ourselves most personal, most vulnerable, most private. A thrilling, urgent, and large-hearted novel that I can’t wait to press upon other readers.”
—Kelly Link, author of The Book of Love
“If you’re concerned, as I am, about surveillance, data-mining, mass incarceration, a misogynistic autocracy run by rogue technocrats—or if you simply like an engrossing, well-written novel—The Dream Hotel is your book. In her fifth novel, the Moroccan-born Laila Lalami has created a substantive, chilling near future and compelled her vivid, sympathetic characters to live in it.”
—Washington Post Book Review
“Powerful, richly conceived…Here, rendering this edge-of-nightmare world, Lalami skates along at the height of her powers as a writer of intelligent, complex characters… Within the latter part of the novel, it’s not the stuff of tragedy or alarm about the human condition we encounter, but surprising, unadulterated hope.”
—Los Angeles Times
“In this sharp, sophisticated novel of forecasts and insightful takes, what I found most powerful was the great bewilderment that the characters share. Lalami traces the upheaval of AI through systems and structures into personal lives, close relationships and quiet thoughts…The Dream Hotel has a burning quality, both in its swift, consuming escalation and in the clarity and purpose of what it shows.”
—The Guardian
“Unsettling, meticulously observed….an alarmingly likely approximation of what we’re all careering toward. Lalami has peered into the future and found that it looks like nothing so much as the present—which is to say dingy, corrupt, dumb, and dishonorable. And terrifying.”
—Vulture
“One of the best high-concept hooks of the year…It feels like a mix between Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report and Wim Wender’s Until the End of the World, written in Lalami’s silky and celebrated prose.”
—Esquire
“The Dream Hotel is a story about the consequences of unchecked power and the small acts of resistance an individual can undertake to fight an unfair system. Sometimes fiction is the best way to look at the terrifying truth and we can use it as a manual to guide us.”
—The Boston Globe
“Wielding the masterful skills of a Pulitzer Prize finalist, Lalami writes a fifth novel and first foray into dystopia that is especially resonant and provocative in an age when surveillance and data collection are increasingly ingrained in our society.”
—Alta
“Author Laila Lalami was previously a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Moor’s Account, and her writing in The Dream Hotel is just as vibrant and fascinating. She has a natural gift for capturing the everyday moments that draw readers in quickly and hold their attention, and her characters could easily be real, and familiar, people.”
—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“Channelling Joseph Heller, Franz Ka”a and George Orwell, this novel imagines society transformed by technology and surveillance… a riveting tale of the risks of surrendering privacy
for convenience.”
—The Economist
“The Dream Hotel is so cleverly conceived, so relevant, that everyone should read it and sweat.”
—The Times of London
“The Dream Hotel is a captivating imaginative feat, taking our familiar world and carefully nudging it just a few degrees closer to the nightmarishly plausible consequences of constant, inescapable surveillance.”
—The Irish Times
“Lalami’s keen insight into our less-than-free society is also reflected in The Dream Hotel’s discussion and engagement with data…The Dream Hotel does not feel like science fiction but rather a commentary on a near future that seems frighteningly close, just out of view.”
—Pop Matters
“An engrossing psychological mystery…Striking at the heart of current fears surrounding technology and control…skewers notions of supposed privacy and freedom make this less speculative fiction, more gripping allegory for our times.”
—The Observer
“Recalls the societal oppression and alienation in the works of Margaret Atwood and Franz Kafka.”
—Associated Press
“The Dream Hotel is the novel of our tech present and future.”
—Chicago Review of Books
“Lalami’s bracingly resonant drama strikes at the very heart of the consumer privacy debate and the freedoms people forfeit to data-hungry conglomerates when we use their products.”
—Shelf Awareness
“This generation’s 1984.”
—Shoreline of Infinity
“The Dream Hotel is a chilling exploration of technology’s dual nature, offering convenience while quietly imprisoning us. Laila Lalami examines the cost of privacy in a world of constant surveillance, asking the question of whether algorithms can ever truly define who we are.”
—Geek Girl Authority
“Stellar… Lalami builds a convincing near-future dystopia out of current events… 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, starred review
“Lalami delivers a stirring dystopian tale of dwindling privacy and freedom in the digital age…chillingly original, echoing widespread fears about the abuse of surveillance technology, and she balances high-concept speculative elements with deep character work. This surreal story feels all too plausible.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Explores predictive policing and what is lost when people choose the promise of safety over individual freedom. Fans of The Minority Report by Philip K. Dick will enjoy this literary novel set in the near future.”
—Booklist, starred review
