The Dream Hotel
- Author Laila Lalami
- Narrator Barton Caplan, Frankie Corzo
- Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing
- Publish Date 4 March 2025
- Run Time 11 hours and 42 minutes
- Format Audio
- Genre Dystopian and utopian fiction, Science fiction, Science fiction: near-future, Speculative fiction.
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What to expect
Bloomsbury presents The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami, read by Frankie Corzo and Barton Caplan
‘A gripping, Kafkaesque foray into an all-too-plausible future’ JENNIFER EGAN
‘Extraordinary’ RUMAAN ALAM
‘Absolutely unputdownable’ SANDRA NEWMAN
Sara is returning home from a conference abroad when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside at the airport. Using data from her dreams, their algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming her husband. For his safety, she must be transferred to a retention centre, and kept under observation for twenty-one days.
But as Sara arrives to be monitored alongside other dangerous dreamers, she discovers that with every deviation from the facility’s strict and ever-shifting rules, their stays can be extended – and that getting home to her family is going to cost much more than just three weeks of good behaviour . . .
The Dream Hotel is a gripping speculative mystery about the seductive dangers of the technologies that are supposed to make our lives easier. As terrifying as it is inventive, it explores how well we can ever truly know those around us – even with the most invasive surveillance systems in place.
‘A gripping, Kafkaesque foray into an all-too-plausible future’ JENNIFER EGAN
‘Extraordinary’ RUMAAN ALAM
‘Absolutely unputdownable’ SANDRA NEWMAN
Sara is returning home from a conference abroad when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside at the airport. Using data from her dreams, their algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming her husband. For his safety, she must be transferred to a retention centre, and kept under observation for twenty-one days.
But as Sara arrives to be monitored alongside other dangerous dreamers, she discovers that with every deviation from the facility’s strict and ever-shifting rules, their stays can be extended – and that getting home to her family is going to cost much more than just three weeks of good behaviour . . .
The Dream Hotel is a gripping speculative mystery about the seductive dangers of the technologies that are supposed to make our lives easier. As terrifying as it is inventive, it explores how well we can ever truly know those around us – even with the most invasive surveillance systems in place.
Critics Review
Reading The Dream Hotel is a physical experience: it’s rare for a novel to induce so strong a sense of powerlessness and frustration ... In this sharp, sophisticated novel of forecasts and insightful takes, what I found most powerful was the great bewilderment that the characters share ... Perhaps you wouldn’t ordinarily pick up a novel in search of an experience of confusion. But The Dream Hotel has a burning quality, both in its swift, consuming escalation – you can’t look away – and in the clarity and purpose of what it shows
Laila Lalami’s brilliant and anxiety-provoking novel The Dream Hotel ... makes you question why we aren’t doing more to protect our privacy right now
Well-written, meticulously conceived, richly characterised and terrifying as hell. It’s just close enough to be imaginable ... She’s a master storyteller, Lalami, and I can’t work out why she isn’t better known. The Dream Hotel just made the long-list for The Women’s Prize, so hopefully she will be soon
A gripping new novel ... Intriguing
The Dream Hotel is so cleverly conceived, so relevant, that everyone should read it and sweat ... It gave me a lot to chew on. Next time I download an app, I’ll be scrutinising the terms of service. Because any of us can fall foul of the algorithm
In the current political and technological climate and the seemingly endless colonisation of data, Lalami has managed to tap into the human psyche on a level that everybody can relate to. The Dream Hotel can deservedly and comfortably sit somewhere between Phillip K Dick’s Minority Report and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. A powerhouse of a book that will live long in the memory
If you’re concerned, as I am, about surveillance, data-mining, mass incarceration, a misogynistic autocracy run by rogue technocrats – or if you simply like an engrossing, well-written novel – The Dream Hotel is your book. In her fifth novel, the Moroccan-born Laila Lalami has created a substantive, chilling near-future and compelled her vivid, sympathetic characters to live in it
Addictive
A captivating imaginative feat, taking our familiar world and carefully nudging it just a few degrees closer to the nightmarishly plausible consequences of constant, inescapable surveillance
I love this book so much ... I read it in a weekend. I could not put it down. It is really relevant. It’s a meditation on free will, sisterhood, the power of love, and the power of hope. It’s so good
Skewers notions of supposed privacy and freedom ... [A] gripping allegory for our times
She can world-build with the best of them
With its tense and engrossing narrative, The Dream Hotel is both a page turner and a salutary warning about putting our trust in big tech
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
I was utterly gripped, caught up, as if I was living the same nightmare as Sara. It felt terrifyingly and convincingly close
A terrifying, thought-provoking and timely exploration of the inevitable march of algorithms and data-harvesting into our innermost lives. The Dream Hotel offers not only a real-feeling diorama of an extensively-surveilled prison population, but a masterclass in the art of cortisol-raising - to be filed alongside The Trial and The School for Good Mothers
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 an 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
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, motherhood, and what we sacrifice, unthinkingly, for the sake of convenience
A thought provoking and compellingly plausible novel. Totally immersive and unputdownable
Absolutely unputdownable. Lalami's protagonist is flawed in ways that frustrate and panic us partly because they're so relatable: these are the mistakes we would end up making; this is how we would find ourselves the victims of the new security technologies that promise to keep us safe. It's also a great work about the warped logic of mass incarceration; a sci-fi take on The Mars Room for the era of ubiquitous surveillance. This is one I'll be thinking about for a long time.
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
Chilling ... A smart dystopia buzzing with killer detail
Powerful, richly conceived ... Here, rendering this edge-of-nightmare world, Lalami skates along at the height of her powers as a writer of intelligent, complex characters ... Within the latter part of the novel, it’s not the stuff of tragedy or alarm about the human condition we encounter, but surprising, unadulterated hope
Unsettling, meticulously observed ... An alarmingly likely approximation of what we’re all careering toward. Lalami has peered into the future and found that it looks like nothing so much as the present – which is to say dingy, corrupt, dumb, and dishonourable. And terrifying
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
The Dream Hotel is a story about the consequences of unchecked power and the small acts of resistance an individual can undertake to fight an unfair system. Sometimes fiction is the best way to look at the terrifying truth and we can use it as a manual to guide us
Wielding the masterful skills of a Pulitzer Prize finalist, Lalami writes a fifth novel and first foray into dystopia that is especially resonant and provocative in an age when surveillance and data collection are increasingly ingrained in our society
Author Laila Lalami was previously a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Moor’s Account, and her writing in The Dream Hotel is just as vibrant and fascinating. She has a natural gift for capturing the everyday moments that draw readers in quickly and hold their attention, and her characters could easily be real, and familiar, people
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
The novel of our tech present and future
Lalami’s bracingly resonant drama strikes at the very heart of the consumer privacy debate and the freedoms people forfeit to data-hungry conglomerates when we use their products
This generation’s 1984
A chilling exploration of technology’s dual nature, offering convenience while quietly imprisoning us
Lalami delivers a stirring dystopian tale of dwindling privacy and freedom in the digital age ... Chillingly original, echoing widespread fears about the abuse of surveillance technology, and she balances high-concept speculative elements with deep character work. This surreal story feels all too plausible
Explores predictive policing and what is lost when people choose the promise of safety over individual freedom. Fans of The Minority Report by Philip K. Dick will enjoy this literary novel set in the near future
This Women’s Prize longlisted novel is grippingly nightmarish, with echoes of The Handmaid’s Tale
Longlisted for the 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction, Lalami’s fifth novel is a nightmarish speculative tale about the terrifying reaches of technology and surveillance
User Reviews
19/04/2025
14/04/2025
22/03/2025
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