322pp., paperback, Bloomsbury, London, (2025) 2026

ISBN: 9781526687166

At the airport Sara is pulled aside by agents from the Risk Assessment Administration and told that data collected from her dreams has determined that she is a threat to her husband. For his safety she will be kept under observation at a retention centre for 21 days. When any deviation from the ever-changing rules can result in her stay at the facility being extended, she realises getting back to her family is going to cost more than an attempt at good behaviour.

"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, author of The Candy House

"The Dream Hotel offers a stark vision of the future ... 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 is the author of five books, including The Moor’s Account, which won the American Book Award, the Arab-American Book Award, and the Hurston / Wright Legacy Award. Her most recent novel, The Other Americans, won the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. Her essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, The Nation, Harper’s, the Guardian, and the 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.

THE DREAM HOTEL

: Lalami (L.)

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