The Glass Hotel: A novel

A memory, but it’s a memory so vivid that there’s a feeling of time travel, of visiting the actual moment.

Not twenty men, twenty coworkers, twenty colleagues who’ve been stuck at sea together for months and are fairly sick of one another’s company, and not a single solitary beer for lubrication, because of the no-alcohol rule.

There is exquisite lightness in waking each morning with the knowledge that the worst has already happened.

Three months of rising in her cabin for a middle-of-the-night shower before breakfast prep, long hours of cooking in a windowless room that moved in rough weather, walks on the deck in rain and in sunlight, sleeping with Geoffrey, overtime hours, three months of hard labor and dreamless sleep while the ship moved on a sixty-eight-day cycle from New

that’s what money gives you: the freedom to stop thinking about money. If you’ve never been without, then you won’t understand the profundity of this, how absolutely this changes your life.

It turned out that never having that conversation with Vincent meant that he was somehow condemned to always have that conversation with Vincent.

One of our signature flaws as a species: we will risk almost anything to avoid looking stupid.

Imagining an alternate reality where there was no Iraq War, for example, or where the terrifying new swine flu in the Republic of Georgia hadn’t been swiftly contained; an alternate world where the Georgia flu blossomed into an unstoppable pandemic and civilization collapsed.

“This is slightly embarrassing,” Alkaitis said that night, when they’d left the bar and retired to a quieter corner of the lobby to discuss investments, “but you said you’re in shipping, and I realized as you said it that I’ve only the dimmest idea of what that actually means.” Leon smiled. “You’re not alone in that. It’s a largely invisible indust