The Dream Hotel: A Read with Jenna Pick

Reviews

A TODAY Read with Jenna Book Club Pick

Longlisted for the 2025 Women's Prize for Fiction

A Best Book of the Year So Far from The Economist
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, ALTA, 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

“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

“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

“Lalami’s social critique has a righteous vigor…The novel’s central vision—a world in which the most private aspects of people’s inner lives are extracted and sold—retains an insidious power, and an uncomfortable relevance.”
—New York Times Book Review

“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

“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.”
—Washington Post

“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

“Unsettling, meticulously observed…This isn’t Dick’s Minority Report, and it’s certainly not Steven Spielberg’s rollicking, ultrasleek 2002 film adaptation, with its magnetized streets and creepy high-tech pod-prisons. It’s worse than all that, 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 dishonorable. And terrifying.”
—Vulture

“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… Lalami’s exploration of the darkest possibilities of technological surveillance challenges us to think about the connection between privacy and freedom.”
—Oprah Daily

"Gripping."
—Men's Health

“Recalls the societal oppression and alienation in the works of Margaret Atwood and Franz Kafka.”
—Associated Press

“Captivating…Vibrant and fascinating…[Lalami] 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…The Dream Hotel is also a very well-written thought exercise that raises serious questions about the effect our dreams have. How could information from our dreams be used, and should it? That the novel is a bit of a cautionary tale is also what adds to its allure. The reader gets the sense that although the story doesn’t take place in the present day, the future it grapples with isn’t all that far off.”
—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Written by the capable hands of a modern literary star, The Dream Hotel is the novel of our tech present and future.”
—Chicago Review of Books

“Unnerving…Privacy never sounded so good.”
—Christian Science Monitor

“I love a good dream, but I can’t stop thinking about Laila Lalami’s dystopian take on the ramifications of a bad one…It might sound like total sci-fi, but Lalami conjures it up with such clarity that the Risk Assessment Administration will start feeling a little too real.”
—Grace Wehniainen, Bustle

“If you thought The Handmaid’s Tale was thought-provoking, brace yourself for The Dream Hotel…Riveting.”
—The SKIMM

“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

“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

“Combining speculative fiction with deep social critique, Lalami’s novel takes familiar tropes and makes something chillingly original as it examines surveillance, systemic injustice, and the cost of safety over freedom.”
—Arlington Magazine

“Striking at the heart of current fears surrounding technology and control, and with distinct echoes of Orwell, Kafka and Atwood…The way [Lalami] skewers notions of supposed privacy and freedom make this less speculative fiction, more gripping allegory for our times.”
—The Guardian

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

“A chilling yet simultaneously deeply humane portrait of our casual willingness to cede more of our privacy to commercial enterprises ravenous for intimate details of our lives in exchange for a promise of comfort and convenience that often proves illusory at best…Evoking comparisons to both Kafka and Orwell, and with an efficient, understated style, Lalami methodically exposes the features of a world that is instantly recognizable as our own but has been altered in fundamental and frightening ways…Lalami depicts her imagined world with a light touch.”
—BookReporter.com

"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…Lalami imbues her propulsive narrative with a sense of foreboding, and Sara's voice is captivating. Ideal for fans of Hum by Helen Phillips, The Dream Hotel is part of an emerging genre of literature exploring motherhood in an age of unforgiving, digitally enhanced surveillance."
—Shelf Awareness

“Lalami steeps her narrative in historical and literary echoes of the inhumane incarceration of women and immigrants…Lalami’s prose, as in her earlier novels, is uniquely attuned to subtleties of character, language, and relationship—small gestures of language and the body—that have profound consequences.”
—Alta, "Encroaching on Dreams"

“Even though Laila Lalami’s near-future thriller shares a similar premise with Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report—that is, the government abuses a pre-crime technology to prosecute people who are not yet guilty—there are so many disturbing, get-under-your-skin details that center it solely in this moment and from this author…In a time when many women are second-guessing what personal data to freely offer to apps in exchange for convenience, this is a chilling premise.”
—Literary Hub

“An excellent read on any timeline but is especially chilling as we watch big tech mine U.S. citizens’ data and erode our privacy in service of their profits in real time.”
—Book Riot

“Undeniably powerful…Lalami’s restraint in introducing futuristic technology only adds to the immediacy of her concerns, and the effect is the sort of near-future nightmare that leaves us with the only dystopian question really worth asking: Are we there yet?”
—Locus Magazine

“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

“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.”
—Alta, "10 New Books for March"

“Lalami’s ingenious premise is both a fertile metaphor for the paradigm shift in the relationship between language and truth that occurs under authoritarianism and an eerily plausible embodiment of the invidious reach of Big Tech into individual private lives.”
—Daily Mail

“Gripping…Lalami explores themes that authors before her have already artfully unpacked. But readers will still want to check out The Dream Hotel—and be grateful they never have to check in.”
—The Economist

“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.”
—Reactor Magazine

“The Dream Hotel is a chilling exploration of technology’s dual nature, offering convenience while quietly imprisoning us. Laila Lalami examines the cost of privacy in a world of constant surveillance, asking the question of whether algorithms can ever truly define who we are.”
—Geek Girl Authority

"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 Expand reviews