The Dream Hotel

Award-winning Lalami’s (Conditional Citizens) new novel starts with Sara’s arrest by the Risk Assessment Administration after data from her dreams indicates that she will soon commit a crime against her husband. As a result, she is required to spend 21 days under observation, along with others convicted of dream deviations. While many of the novel’s devices are commonplace tropes—AI surveillance, for example—Lalami’s distinctive writing style adds a layered edge, effecting a strange, reverberating quietness that abruptly yet elegantly morphs into critiques of systemic inequities in the book’s dystopian world. The story feels urgent and real, but this is not a fast-paced thriller, although elements of that genre come into play. Instead, Lalami leans toward the speed of thoughts, their lack of linearity, and the strange overlap between the feeling and thinking worlds of people’s inner lives, here made visible and tactile through AI.