The Glass Hotel

I hadn't heard of Emily St. John Mandel before I read Station Eleven, a dystopian novel, earlier this year. I was mightily impressed and decided to read her latest book, The Glass Hotel. It's a book that unfolds in a gradual, almost dreamlike way and I wasn't sure where it was leading or even who the narrator was until I'd almost reached the end of it. The story is a complex and fascinating one, no doubt inspired by the Bernie Madoff scandal in the 1980s. It starts off with a pair of troubled half-siblings and morphs into a tale about a Ponzi scheme, a giant financial fraud that collapses, leaving shattered people in its wake. The author pulls together a lot of disparate characters in surprising ways and I found myself thinking "Ah, so that's what was going on" at different junctures. It's not necessary to like stories about the world of finance and its attendant disasters. Goodness knows I don't and I enjoyed The Glass Hotel very,very much. There are ghosts and more greed than you can shake a stick at. I plan to read every book this author has written.