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The Dream Hotel

Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2025

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The Dream Hotel

By: Laila Lalami
Narrated by: Barton Caplan, Frankie Corzo
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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. Dystopian Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Science Fiction Dream
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Critic reviews

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 (Ann Patchett, author of TOM LAKE and THE DUTCH HOUSE)
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 (Pandora Sykes)
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 (Jenna Bush Hager)
Skewers notions of supposed privacy and freedom ... [A] gripping allegory for our times
She can world-build with the best of them
All stars
Most relevant
Story overly long and ending very quick Didn't particularly enjoy or reccommend. Just don't bother

Didn't really go any where

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Realistic characters and storyline. Very close to today's world and what is happening with AI. Would recommended to anyone looking for a futuristic story.

Relistc storyline

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Uncannily the events are played out on our daily news. Epithets of our daily lives becomes a profitable business that is utilised to control the population.

Dystopian novel reflects fractured USA

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This was definitely a ‘curate’s egg’ kind of read for me. I loved the beginning: feeling our way around the ‘not a prison’; trying to work out what it really was, and the events that led up to its creation. Learning why the main character was in there was also a fascinating insight into a world that really doesn’t feel very far out of sight at all. The characters were a great mix and it was a new and different kind of read.
But oh, the ending! I was at best, underwhelmed.
I felt important questions weren’t answered (I can’t list for fear of spoilers, but to do with the main character and her husband’s behaviour while she is in the hostel - would have preferred his life without her to have been bigger in the plot) and I also finished the book feeling that it just sort of petered out. Again, tricky to explain why without spoilers is tricky (!) but I felt it needed something bigger to happen regarding the lives of the characters and the life of the hostel. An interesting read, at parts entertaining and thought-provoking but after its brilliant opening, I was left a bit disappointed.

Great premise and characters

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A lot happens to Sara that would be frustrating and traumatising. But the voice actor gives her this self-pitying, eye-rolling tone that comes out whatever's happening. I don't get it. It doesn't fit Sara’s character at all.

Annoying narrator

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