The dream hotel

By Laila Lalami

Near Future

Review by Ant

There used to be a pretty clear distinction between literary fiction and science fiction, with critics and prize committees firmly policing the border between the two. Heaven forbid someone would try to dilute the DNA. That distinction has been quietly eroded over the last ten or twenty years, on occasion without these literary police even noticing.

But sci-fi authors have been writing literary fiction for decades. Everything Margaret Atwood has written is literary fiction. She's not alone either; Ursula K. Le Guin, Ian Banks, and Philip K. Dick, in his less pulpy mood, were all writing literary fiction amongst others. People didn't define it quite so much, and they didn't really stray into the mainstream. Now, though, we've got the likes of Kazuo Ishiguro, who brought us Klara and the Sun. Ian McEwan, less successfully, gave us Machines Like Me. Now Laila Lalami, a Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Moor's Account and a National Book Award finalist for The Other Americans, has produced her latest novel and her first proper foray into the speculative, The Dream Hotel.

The premise is the kind of thing that, written ten years ago, would have read as paranoid, and today, mostly reads as forecasting, or by some news accounts, less fiction and more fact.

The protagonist is Sara Hussein, a Moroccan-American historian and digital archivist at the Getty in Los Angeles. After landing at LAX on her way home from a conference in London, she is pulled aside by agents of the "Risk Assessment Administration" (definitely not ICE, no siree), a federal agency that uses biometric and behavioural data to calculate the probability that any given citizen is about to commit a crime. Sara's score is, by some opaque algorithmic process, too high. Her dreams, harvested by a neuroprosthetic device she had implanted to help with her insomnia, have flagged her.

She is told the data suggests she is at imminent risk of harming her husband, and that she will need to be detained for three weeks of observation at a facility called Madison, out in the California desert. Three weeks, of course, is not really three weeks. It is three weeks plus whatever extensions the facility can extract from her by way of small infractions, of which there are conveniently many to be had. The RAA was set up in the wake of a mass shooting at a Super Bowl halftime show, the kind of inciting incident that allows a great deal of bad law to be written, and which Lalami chooses wisely not to dwell on. Heaven knows how long I'd get with my often lucid dreams; I don't think I'd ever see the light of day. I wonder what Trump dreams of during those meetings he seems to snooze through. I expect it's something that would earn at least a few days.

The book proceeds, for the most part, in close third person around Sara, interspersed with what amount to found documents: terms of service from the private firm running the facility, internal memos, transcripts of hearings, snippets of corporate procedure. This is one of those quietly clever structural decisions that pays off the whole way through. The dystopia is delivered not as exposition but as paperwork, and there is something genuinely chilling about reading the bureaucratic prose of a company that has decided your dreams are its property, especially when the prose itself is so unnervingly close to the kind of cookie banner you click through every day without reading. Lalami has said in interviews that she started writing the book after her phone offered her, unprompted, the travel time to a yoga class she had never told it about. It shows.

The obvious points of reference are all the ones every other reviewer reaches for. Philip K. Dick's The Minority Report (and of course the film of the same name), naturally, since pre-crime is the central conceit, although Dick's story was told from the perspective of the police, and this one is firmly with the suspect. The Handmaid's Tale, because near-future America dystopia, and because women in institutional uniforms. Kafka, because no one can ever quite say what Sara has done or what she would need to do to get out. Orwell, obviously, because Orwell.

It is not a perfect book. Several reviews I've seen found it overlong, and they have a point. The middle sections, where Sara is essentially marking time at the facility while the months bleed past her, can feel like marking time on the page, and the dream sequences do not always land as dreams; they are often a bit too neatly significant, a bit too explicable, when the experience of dreaming is so much weirder. But I guess that's the point; we are not supposed to feel comfortable, or indeed entertained. Being incarcerated in such a way is largely monotonous, and this mid-section shows this.

The character of Sara herself is a bit too innocuous as a protagonist, too beige to really connect to her in any meaningful way. Whether you read that as a flaw or as a feature depends, I think, on what you take the book to be doing. If The Dream Hotel is a novel about a person, Sara is underdeveloped. If it is a novel about a system, Sara is exactly the right kind of unremarkable victim, and the fact that she is unremarkable is more or less half the point.

I think that this is a book whose value is less in how thrilling it is to read than in how difficult it is to stop thinking about afterwards, which I continued to do for quite some time. That's the power of a good book; it's what it leaves you with, how it makes you think. The parallels to current America are pretty stark, with talks of ICE being little more than hired thugs, in one case arresting a woman whose husband's passport had expired - not even her own passport, but her partner's. It sits, for me, on the same shelf as The Handmaid's Tale and The School for Good Mothers, which is to say it sits on a shelf I would rather we didn't need to keep adding to, and yet here we are, adding to it. It deserves its place on this year's Arthur C Clarke Award shortlist.

Written on 17th August 2026 by Ant .

The dream hotel

Topics and themes

You may also like

The dream hotel

Topics and themes

Key Tropes

Tone & Pace

Themes

Setting

Content/Warnings

General

You may also like