The Dream Hotel

A TODAY Read with Jenna Book Club Pick

Longlisted for the 2025 Women's Prize for Fiction

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

"Recalls the societal oppression and alienation in the works of Margaret Atwood and Franz Kafka." -Associated Press