All contemporary novels are now pre-pandemic novels – Covid-19 has scored a line across our culture – but what Mandel captures is the last blissful gasp of complacency, a knowing portrait of the end of unknowing. But it is as a spectral sequel to Station Eleven that The Glass Hotel stumbles into poignance, as pre-pandemic fiction. With its shattered narrative, the joys of The Glass Hotel are participatory: piecing together the connections and intersections of Mandel’s human cartography, a treasure map ripped to pieces. It’s a beguiling conceit: the global financial crisis as a ghost story. 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. Her new novel SEA OF TRANQUILITY is forthcoming from Picador UK in April 2022. STATION ELEVEN, Emily's latest novel, was published by Picador in September 2014 and was a National Book Award for Fiction finalist.Įmily's new novel, THE GLASS HOTEL, was published by Picador UK in August 2020, and longlisted for the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize. She is married and lives in New York City. She is a staff writer for The Millions, and her short fiction and essays have been included in numerous anthologies. Her previous novels are THE LOLA QUARTET, THE SINGER'S GUN, and LAST NIGHT IN MONTREAL, all of which have been reissued by Picador. John Mandel was born on the west coast of British Columbia, Canada.
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