To me, this is an even more impressive novel than Station Eleven given its scope, its underlying sense of (shared) humanity, and its interwoven stories that often feel patchworked and at times random, yet which always eventually show their threads and the points at which they intersect. There are so many ways to haunt a person, or a life… Mandel’s concern here is less with the Ponzi scheme that serves to unite the narrative and its characters, than it is with the rippling-out effect of this act of fraud-culminating and collapsing in the economic meltdown of 2008-and how its repercussions are felt by myriad characters: from hotel managers to investors, from addicts to inmates, from lovers to ghosts. The Glass Hotel is a tremendous book, with a wholly unique and dazzling structure that spans time, countries, and space-even those liminal spaces like memories, hallucinations, and hauntings. … every time you retrieve a memory, that act of retrieval, it corrupts the memory a little bit.
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