The Dream Hotel

Praise

A Most Anticipated Book of 2025 from TIME Magazine and Language Arts

“A gripping, Kafkaesque foray into an all-too-plausible future where data collection penetrates interior life, The Dream Hotel is also an elegant meditation on identity and what we sacrifice, unthinkingly, for the sake of convenience.”
—Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Candy House

“The Dream Hotel offers a stark vision of the future—in which America is a surveillance state, ruled by the intertwined forces of capital and government, powered by all-too-fallible algorithm that determines criminality based on citizen’s dreams. That’s plainly a metaphor for extant practices of social control, but Laila Lalami’s extraordinary new novel is more than just a political warning; the book is an exploration of the psyche itself, the strange ungovernable forces of fate and emotion that make us human.”
—Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind

“I loved The Dream Hotel . . . I was utterly gripped, caught up, as if I was living the same nightmare as Sara. It felt terrifyingly and convincingly close.”
—Esther Freud, author of Hideous Kinky

“Stellar…There are echoes of The Handmaid’s Tale here—as Margaret Atwood does in that book, Lalami builds a convincing near-future dystopia out of current events…But Lalami’s scenario is unique and well-imagined—interspersed report sheets, transcripts, and terms-of-service lingo have a realistic, poignant lyricism that exposes the cruel bureaucracy in which Sara is trapped…And the story exposes the particular perniciousness of big tech’s capacity to exploit our every movement, indeed practically every thought…Striking…An engrossing and troubling dystopian tale.”
—Kirkus, starred review