The Dream Hotel

A gripping, inventive and terrifying speculative mystery about privacy, freedom and survival – from the Pulitzer Prize and Booker Prize nominated author

Well-written, meticulously conceived, richly characterised and terrifying as hell. It’s just close enough to be imaginable ... She’s a master storyteller, Lalami, and I can’t work out why she isn’t better known. The Dream Hotel just made the long-list for The Women’s Prize, so hopefully she will be soon

A gripping new novel ... Intriguing

The Dream Hotel is so cleverly conceived, so relevant, that everyone should read it and sweat ... It gave me a lot to chew on. Next time I download an app, I’ll be scrutinising the terms of service. Because any of us can fall foul of the algorithm

In the current political and technological climate and the seemingly endless colonisation of data, Lalami has managed to tap into the human psyche on a level that everybody can relate to. The Dream Hotel can deservedly and comfortably sit somewhere between Phillip K Dick’s Minority Report and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale . A powerhouse of a book that will live long in the memory

Addictive

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

With its tense and engrossing narrative, The Dream Hotel is both a page turner and a salutary warning about putting our trust in big tech

I love this book so much ... I read it in a weekend. I could not put it down. It is really relevant. It’s a meditation on free will, sisterhood, the power of love, and the power of hope. It’s so good

Skewers notions of supposed privacy and freedom ... [A] gripping allegory for our times

She can world-build with the best of them

With its tense and engrossing narrative, The Dream Hotel is both a page turner and a salutary warning about putting our trust in big tech

I was utterly gripped , caught up, as if I was living the same nightmare as Sara. It felt terrifyingly and convincingly close

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

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

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

A thought provoking and compellingly plausible novel. Totally immersive and unputdownable

Absolutely unputdownable. Lalami's protagonist is flawed in ways that frustrate and panic us partly because they're so relatable: these are the mistakes we would end up making; this is how we would find ourselves the victims of the new security technologies that promise to keep us safe. It's also a great work about the warped logic of mass incarceration ; a sci-fi take on The Mars Room for the era of ubiquitous surveillance. This is one I'll be thinking about for a long time.

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

Laila Lalami is the author of five books, including The Moor's Account , which won the American Book Award, Arab American Book Award and Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. It was on the longlist for the Booker Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Her essays appear regularly in the Los Angeles Times , Washington Post , Nation , Harper’s , Guardian and New York Times . She has been awarded fellowships from the British Council, the Fulbright Program, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University. She lives in Los Angeles.