The Dream Hotel: A Read with Jenna Pick

Reviews

A TODAY Read with Jenna Book Club Pick

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, Business Recorder, Deseret News, Kirkus, Screen Rant, The OC Register, Electric Literature, The A.V. Club, 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

“Powerful, richly conceived…The book’s corporatized reality is slightly more twisted than ours but entirely plausible…Lalami plays out the shiftiness and uncertainty of reality when dreams are given more predictive weight than facts to stunning effect…Here, rendering this edge-of-nightmare world, Lalami skates along at the height of her powers as a writer of intelligent, complex characters…As with her other novels, there’s a softhearted universalism to Lalami’s treatment of surveillance capitalism. Hers is one in which humans retain the ability to trust one another enough to forge working solidarities and authentic collaborations. Although it relies on a speculative technology for its plot, The Dream Hotel is astounding, elegantly constructed, character-driven fiction. Lalami’s realistic approach to Sara and others, inflected with leftist politics and history, elides any sharp division we might imagine about where we’ve been and what we face ahead…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.”
—Los Angeles Times

“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.”
—Jenna Bush Hager, TODAY

“Laila Lalami is a chronicler of cultures and an observer of human behavior toward marginalized communities. Her fifth book, The Dream Hotel, continues in that vein, exploring how far surveillance can go in a government’s attempts to stifle human rights…Lalami delivers the same message in lyrical language while subtly posing the question: Who will fight for you if a machine deems you a threat? And how will you fight for your own dignity? 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.”
—Boston Globe

“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

“In today’s swiftly-evolving algorithm-driven world, this dystopia doesn’t seem very distant…Lalami challenges readers to consider what privacy means and if it is possible at all.”
—Business Recorder

"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

"A stirring dystopian tale of dwindling privacy and freedom in the digital age...The premise calls to mind Philip K. Dick’s The Minority Report, but Lalami’s version is 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."
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Fans of The Minority Report by Philip K. Dick and Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng will enjoy this literary novel set in the near future.”
—Booklist, starred review
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