The Glass Hotel is the fifth novel penned by Canadian author Emily St. John Mandel. One literary critic described the work as "a jigsaw puzzle that was missing its box"; the novel tells the story of two siblings whose lives are a mixture of heartache, happiness, extreme wealth, drug abuse and a little remorsefulness thrown in for good measure.
The novel is predominantly set on a remote island in British Columbia. The protagonist, Paul, is an eighteen year old drug addict who visits his thirteen year old half sister, Vincent, after the death of her mother. Five years later, both are working at a hotel, where Paul scrawls a threatening message on the mirror in one of the guest rooms. Vincent marries a rich banker whose wealth turns out to come from an illegal Ponzi scheme. Throughout the novel, Mandel shows the siblings both as individual characters, and as interlinking elements of each other's lives as well.
St. John Mandel's fourth novel, Station Eleven, was the recipient of nominations for the PEN Faulkner Award, the National Book Award and the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction; an apocalyptic tale, it was the winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the Toronto Book Award.
