Paperback, 301 pages
English language
Published Oct. 4, 2020 by HarperCollins Publishers.
Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star glass-and-cedar palace on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island. New York financier Jonathan Alkaitis owns the hotel. When he passes Vincent his card with a tip, it’s the beginning of their life together. That same day, a hooded figure scrawls a note on the windowed wall of the hotel: “Why don’t you swallow broken glass.” Leon Prevant, a shipping executive for a company called Neptune-Avramidis, sees the note from the hotel bar and is shaken to his core. Thirteen years later, Vincent mysteriously disappears from the deck of a Neptune-Avramidis ship.
Weaving together the lives of these characters, The Glass Hotel moves between the ship, the skyscrapers of Manhattan and the wilderness of remote British Columbia, painting a breathtaking picture of greed and guilt, fantasy and delusion, art and the ghosts of our pasts.
(From Goodreads.)
I felt like I never really understood what this book was about the whole time I was reading it, and yet I found it strangely compelling. I got sad as I saw the end of the book approaching. I think I'll be returning to this one.
Great story, characters, settings & writing. Among other things, I really enjoyed the exploration of liminal spaces, of haunting/being haunted, and of life vs counterlife ... and characters imagining alternate paths unfolding if they had done something different. Also interesting ideas about the different "countries" we inhabit - money, sickness, misfortune, shadow, etc. Now I'm really looking forward to reading Sea of Tranquility.
