the glass hotel by emily st john mandel review

Mandel’s literary success has placed her at events where she spends time with very wealthy people like the ones she so sharply characterizes in The Glass Hotel. Then, as you get older, you encounter people who have grown up in very different circumstances, and you start to see how much of life can be influenced by how much money your family has.” You’re very aware that you’re wearing secondhand clothes and your friends aren’t. But what growing up without much money gives you is a sort of painful awareness of money. I had great parents and a really good childhood, even though we really didn’t have much. “I grew up in a very working-class environment,” Mandel says. It’s about money and the compromises and moral panics of gaining it, having it and losing it-a topic that Mandel acknowledges is rarely talked about, let alone written about in fiction. Instead, The Glass Hotel tells a more intricate, haunting and enthralling story, drawing some of its narrative energy from Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. Much of that speculation had to do with whether or not the new novel would also be a chilling, post-apocalyptic tale like Station Eleven. “Everybody in is haunted in some way by memory or by actual ghosts.”

I was aware that people were waiting for the new book, speculating about it.” Afterward, I had this internal pressure that I needed to replicate its success. But before Station Eleven, I had no sense of anybody waiting for my next book. “That’s about the least sympathetic problem in the entire world, so I don’t talk about it too much. “When you have a wildly successful book, you have a sense of audience that wasn’t there before,” Mandel says during a call to her home in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where the Vancouver Island native has lived for almost 17 years. Her surprise bestselling fourth novel, Station Eleven (2014), launched her into the literary stratosphere.

Success, we often hear, is a double-edged sword.

The glass hotel by emily st john mandel review