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Critics' Opinion:
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First Published:
Mar 2020, 320 pages
Paperback:
Feb 2021, 320 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Rachel Hullett
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From the award-winning author of Station Eleven , an exhilarating novel set at the glittering intersection of two seemingly disparate events - a massive Ponzi scheme collapse and the mysterious disappearance of a woman from a ship at sea.
Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star hotel on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island. On the night she meets Jonathan Alkaitis, a hooded figure scrawls a message on the lobby's glass wall: "Why don't you swallow broken glass." Leon Prevant, a shipping executive for Neptune-Avradimis, reads the words and orders a drink to calm down. Alkaitis, the owner of the hotel and a wealthy investment manager, arrives too late to read the threat, never knowing it was intended for him. He leaves Vincent a hundred dollar tip along with his business card, and a year later they are living together as husband and wife.
High above Manhattan, a greater crime is committed: Alkaitis is running an international Ponzi scheme, moving imaginary sums of money through clients' accounts. He holds the life savings of an artist named Olivia Collins, the fortunes of a Saudi prince and his extended family, and countless retirement funds, including Leon Prevant's. The collapse of the financial empire is as swift as it is devastating, obliterating fortunes and lives, while Vincent walks away into the night. Until, years later, she steps aboard a Neptune-Avramidis vessel, the Neptune Cumberland, and disappears from the ship between ports of call.
In this captivating story of crisis and survival, Emily St. John Mandel takes readers through often hidden landscapes: campgrounds for the near-homeless, underground electronica clubs, the business of international shipping, service in luxury hotels, and life in a federal prison. Rife with unexpected beauty, The Glass Hotel is a captivating portrait of greed and guilt, love and delusion, ghosts and unintended consequences, and the infinite ways we search for meaning in our lives.
1
VINCENT IN THE OCEAN
December 2018
1
Begin at the end: plummeting down the side of the ship in the storm's wild darkness, breath gone with the shock of falling, my camera flying away through the rain—
2
Sweep me up. Words scrawled on a window when I was thirteen years old. I stepped back and let the marker drop from my hand and still I remember the exuberance of that moment, that feel- ing in my chest like light glinting on crushed glass—
3
Have I risen to the surface? The cold is annihilating, the cold is all there is—
4
A strange memory: standing by the shore at Caiette when I was thirteen years old, my brand-new video camera cool and strange in my hands, filming the waves in five-minute intervals, and as I'm filming I hear my own voice whispering, "I want to go home, I want to go home, I want to go home," although where is home if not there?
5
Where am I? Neither in nor out of the ocean, I can't feel the cold anymore or actually anything, I am aware of a border but I can't...
While not necessarily a thriller, there's an addictive, almost obsessive quality that compels the reader to turn pages both out of excitement and anxiety. The Glass Hotel is Mandel at the top of her craft: from prose to structure to character work to emotional heft, it's a supple, poignant book, as suspenseful as it is quietly affecting...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Rachel Hullett).
In Emily St. John Mandel's The Glass Hotel, the protagonist finds herself ensnared in the Ponzi scheme of a Wall Street investor. The "Ponzi scheme" takes its name from Charles Ponzi, an Italian immigrant and businessman who lived in Boston in the early 20th century. Ponzi schemes are fraudulent investments in which a business will promise above-average returns to investors under the guise that these returns are coming from above-average sales—in actuality, the funds are coming from other investors. Historically described as "robbing Peter to pay Paul," the Ponzi scheme provides the illusion of sustainable business to investors who are continuously lured in until the scheme eventually collapses.
The first known Ponzi scheme was ...
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