It’s a beguiling conceit: the global financial crisis as a ghost story. In his medium-security cell, unrepentant Alkaitis conjures a spectral “counterlife” so intoxicating the real world loses form, a luxurious dreamscape with no extradition treaty.

“There are so many ways to haunt a person,” Mandel writes, “or a life.” The Glass Hotel is crowded with phantoms: lost mothers wronged victims a “ghost fleet” of empty container ships a beyond-the-grave curse scrawled in acid. What are we to make of these future echoes? They are not warnings it seems, but hauntings. Alkaitis, we learn, will die in prison Vincent will drown. The future is restless in The Glass Hotel, impatient and insistent: it interrupts the present to tether consequences to actions, ends to beginnings. The time of plummeting stock prices and collapsing banks is near. The keys to the kingdom are hers, but not for long. Alkaitis then requests her companionship in exchange for “the freedom to stop thinking about money”. When newly widowed Alkaitis orders a drink, Vincent is who he needs her to be. Vincent has a “very particular gift”: she’s a lithe social chameleon. Her best friend drives the hotel boat her brother, Paul – aspiring composer, recovering addict – sweeps the floors. Mixing cocktails in the hotel bar is directionless Vincent, a young woman marking time in her remote hometown, a stifling place with one road and “two dead ends”. This is a tale of Ponzi schemes, not pestilence.Įmily St John Mandel. Mandel has not penned a ticking-clock prequel rather, her new novel is a portrait of everyday obliviousness, the machinery of late neoliberalism juddering along with characteristic inequity. The “Georgia Flu” is lurking, but we will never learn if it is days, months, or a year away. Ī handful of quietly placed clues suggest that The Glass Hotel exists in the same universe as Station Eleven, in a time before the outbreak. How better to while away a stint in lockdown than by bending our waking terrors into the most comforting and redemptive of shapes – the narrative arc. But as we face Covid-19, the strange, masochistic allure of havoc-lit has catapulted Mandel’s post-pandemic tale of itinerant Shakespearean actors back into bestseller territory. That book was always going to cast a shadow over its successor – such is the curse of a career-defining blockbuster.

F ew readers will come to Emily St John Mandel’s fifth novel, The Glass Hotel, unaware of her fourth, 2014’s Station Eleven, which imagined a world ravaged by a hyper-lethal form of swine flu.

The glass hotel paperback