Reader\'s Digest Canada - 05.2020

THE GLASS HOTEL

by Emily St. John Mandel

($24.99, HARPERCOLLINS)

what it’s about: The Glass Hotel is a

literary jigsaw puzzle. Three characters

meet one night in 2005 at the eponym-

ous hotel, a stunning edifice located

on a speck of Vancouver Island so

remote it’s only accessible by water.

Jonathan Alkaitis, the hotel’s owner, is

a corrupt Wall Street financier who’s

running a multi-billion-dollar Ponzi

scheme. Leon Prevant is a shipping

executive and hotel guest who loses his

fortune to Alkaitis’s fraud. And Vincent

Smith is an enigmatic young woman

and bartender who becomes Alkaitis’s

trophy wife. The book spans two

decades and, by the end, one of the

characters will have vanished from a

container ship off the coast of West

Africa. St. John Mandel effortlessly ping-

pongs between time periods, characters

and continents, and Smith is the chain

that links those vignettes together. The

BY Emily Landau

Every month,

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104 may 2020

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