The Glass Hotel (2020), by Emily St John Mandel

I’ve been having a bit of a binge on the M shelf: nothing to make a serious dent in it, but when I didn’t have room for Simon Mawer’s new novel Ancestry, I chose four books at random for the bedside table.  I can’t imagine what possessed me to buy Almost English by Charlotte Mendelson and I abandoned it, but I enjoyed Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs (see my review); Andrew Miller’s Now We Shall Be Entirely Free is looking good so far, and Emily St John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel has turned out to be an excellent choice!

Quite apart from the subject matter, which is a splendid takedown of the amoral greed of neoliberalism, I really enjoyed the fractured narrative. The Glass Hotel is a cunningly structured jigsaw puzzle which reveals its interlocking parts over the course of its 300 pages.  It’s a book that…