The Dream Hotel: A Novel by Laila Lalami (Hardcover) (PREORDER)

Fiction - Literary - Dystopian - Political 

RELEASE DATE: 3/4/2025 (WILL SHIP DIRECTLY FROM OUR SUPPLIER'S WAREHOUSE AND ARRIVE 1-2 DAYS AFTER THE RELEASE DATE)

From Laila Lalami—the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist and a “maestra of literary fiction” (NPR)—comes a riveting and utterly original novel about one woman’s fight for freedom, set in a near future where even dreams are under surveillance.

Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA’s algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days.

The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes. With every deviation from the strict and ever-shifting rules of the facility, their stay is extended. Months pass and Sara seems no closer to release. Then one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and leading Sara on a collision course with the very companies that have deprived her of her freedom.

Eerie, urgent, and ceaselessly clear-eyed, The Dream Hotel artfully explores the seductive nature of technology, which puts us in shackles even as it makes our lives easier. Lalami asks how much of ourselves must remain private if we are to remain free, and whether even the most invasive forms of surveillance can ever capture who we really are.

AUTHOR BIO: 

LAILA LALAMI is the author of five books, including The Moor's Account, which won the American Book Award, the Arab-American Book Award, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; was on the longlist for the Booker Prize; and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her most recent novel, The Other Americans, was a national bestseller, won the Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her books have been translated into twenty languages. Lalami's writing appears regularly in the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, Harper's, The Guardian, and The New York Times. She has been awarded fellowships from the British Council, the Fulbright Program, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University. She lives in Los Angeles.

One of the New York Post's 30 Must-Read New Thrillers

A Most Anticipated Book of 2025 from Goodreads, People, TIME Magazine, TODAY, The Washington Post, New York Times Book Review Podcast, Esquire, Men's Health, Marie Claire, The National, New Scientist, Literary Hub, Deseret News, Kirkus, Screen Rant, The OC Register, Electric Literature, Language Arts, and The Crimson White

"Brilliant...Makes you question why we aren't doing more to protect our privacy right now."
--Ann Patchett in TheSkimm

"One of the best high-concept hooks of the year...It feels like a mix between Steven Spielberg's Minority Report and Wim Wender's Until the End of the World, written in Lalami's silky and celebrated prose."
-- Esquire

"Gripping."
--Men's Health

"Lalami's keen insight into our less-than-free society is also reflected in The Dream Hotel's discussion and engagement with data... The Dream Hotel does not feel like science fiction but rather a commentary on a near future that seems frighteningly close, just out of view."
-- Pop Matters

"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

"The world in Lalami's novel feels one step away from ours, which makes it astonishingly easy to slip inside. The women in The Dream Hotel grapple with the ways in which capitalism and technology sell off the pieces of ourselves most personal, most vulnerable, most private. A thrilling, urgent, and large-hearted novel that I can't wait to press upon other readers."
--Kelly Link, author of The Book of Love

"Fascinating...Far from heavy-handed or distracting, Sara's dreams during her incarceration are an integral part of the plot, intertwined with her waking reality at Madison...The details of life at Madison as well as the personalities of the other inmates, all women, are richly imagined, recalling Jessamine Chan's The School for Good Mothers...Like that book, The Dream Hotel entertains even as it tolls its warning."
--Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Even our dreams are surveilled and punished in this alarmingly plausible novel by the virtuosic Laila Lalami."
-- Electric Literature